Bloody Genius (23 page)

“What!”

“I need your permission to go in there and hold him.”

“I live in Sunfish Lake. I’m eight minutes from there. I can bring keys.” Virgil heard him call to his wife: “Andi, get my pants and a shirt.” He then came back to Virgil. “You have my permission to go in, but I can bring keys.”

“Do you have keys for the back door, by the loading dock?”

“Yes!”

“Then let’s do that,” Virgil said. “You know where the Aerotop warehouse is? A block down from you and—”

“I know it.”

“Come in from the back, park on the other side from your building so you’re out of sight. We’ll wait for you there.”

“I’m coming. I got my pants on. I could bring my Ruger, I’ve got a carry permit—”

“No, no, no . . .”

Virgil sent Jenkins to sneak back around the Aerotop building to meet Booker; while Jenkins did that, Virgil called the duty officer at the Eagan Police Department and explained the situation. “We’ll be going in the back. If you can do it, I’d like you to keep a car a few blocks away, not too close, and then when I say go, have them pull into the front parking lot with their flashers on to discourage runners. There are three doors, grab anybody coming out.”

“We can do that. We got nothing going tonight.”

Virgil waited, watching the back door of the Surface Research building with his binoculars; he saw no movement at all. Ten minutes after Jenkins left, he was back with a tall, thin man with curly black hair and a large, bony nose. The man got in the back of the Tahoe, and said, “I’m Stu Booker. How’d you find out about this? Do you know what he’s doing in there?”

“We got it from one of our confidential informants, and I can’t disclose the source quite yet,” Virgil said. “Our source says this guy is accessing a computer to get all the information he can about paints that will be used to guide self-driving cars.”

“Sonofabitch! Sonofabitch! I thought that had to be it,” Booker said. “Jesus Christ, if that gets out of the building . . . We gotta stop this.”

“We will. You should know that our source says he’s already been in there several times.”

“Oh my God!”

“Did you bring a key for the back door?”

“Yes.” Booker fumbled in his jacket pocket and produced a key on a horsehair ring. “I go in the back myself sometimes. Listen, the guy must be in the engineering office.”

Booker described a route through the production facility and up into the engineering, design, and administrative offices. “I’ll come with you and point the way.”

“Let’s go,” Virgil said.

They walked along the exterior wall of Aerotop, hidden by the trucks, then behind it, across the street, around another warehouse, and finally across the street again and up to the windowless side of Surface Research. From there, they walked to the corner of the building, a hundred feet or so from the back door.

They paused while Virgil called the Eagan police; the cars, two minutes out, would be rolling in seconds.

“Go,” Virgil said to Jenkins, who had the key. “Quick, now.”

Jenkins was a runner; he sprinted down the back of the building and up the stairs to the door next to the loading dock. Virgil and Booker arrived right behind Jenkins, who had already fit the key in the lock. He twisted it, pulled his pistol, and bumped the door open with his hip.

To an empty hallway.

“Straight ahead,” Booker whispered.

Virgil led, Jenkins trailed, watching either side. Moving quickly, they crossed a pair of hallways that led into the production area
of the building. Most of the lights were out, and Virgil could barely make out what looked like racks of machinery and barrels and, in the biggest open area, cone-shaped machines, twenty feet tall and fifteen feet across, like alien invaders from Mars.

He paused to look at them, and Booker, catching up, whispered, “Mixers.”

Halfway through the plant, they crossed another hallway that led to offices to their right and a flight of stairs going up. They had not heard, let alone seen, a single living being.

Booker whispered, “Production offices down here. They’ll be up in engineering. The night guard’s name is Allen Young. He is armed. The stairs are metal, and they’ll make noise if we’re not careful.”

“Eagan cops gonna be here soon,” Jenkins whispered. “We gotta move before we get a parking lot full of flashers.”

They tiptoed up the metal stairs, emerging in a hallway lined with offices. To his left, Virgil could see that the offices on that side looked over the production facility. To the right, they looked over the front parking lot.

They could see a dimly lighted window halfway down the hall in front of them. “Engineering,” Booker whispered.

Virgil said, “Stay right here,” and he and Jenkins walked down the hall toward the office. They were fifteen feet away when a man stepped into the hallway, saw them, shouted, “Hey!” and made a move for his hip.

Virgil shouted, “Police! Freeze!”

Jenkins yelled, “Freeze! Freeze! Put your hands up where we can see them. Hands up! Don’t touch that gun.”

Virgil shouted, “Allen, hands over your head or we will shoot . . .”

The man stopped moving, then slowly lifted his hands. Down the hall, another door burst open, and a man ran through it and away from them, and Virgil said to Jenkins, “Get him.”

Jenkins took off, and Virgil shouted at the guard, “Don’t move, man, or we’ll shoot. We
will
shoot you.”

Jenkins blew past the guard, and from behind Virgil Booker shouted to Jenkins, “There’s another stairs . . .”

Virgil closed on the guard, his Glock up in the man’s face. “Turn around, put your hands on the wall.”

“I’m the security guard here,” the man said, as he put his hands on the wall above his head.

“We know, Allen. I’m going to take your pistol. Keep your hands on the wall, I’m nervous here, and this trigger is pretty light. Take it easy, and we’ll all be fine.”

Jenkins piled down the second flight of metal stairs, thirty feet behind the runner. The two large men hit the treads hard, making a racket like somebody beating on an oil drum with a ball-peen hammer. At the bottom of the stairs, the runner, who’d been carrying a black bag, dropped it. Jenkins vaulted over the bag and kept closing in on the man and caught him as they got to the back door. He pushed the man hard on the back of the neck and the man lost his balance and fell face forward, nearly colliding head-on with the door. Jenkins knelt on the man’s back, wrenched one of his arms up and back, clicked on a cuff, said, “Gimme the other arm, Boyd. C’mon, don’t make me dislocate your shoulder.”

“How’d you know my name?”

“We know all,” Jenkins said. Nash relaxed his other arm, and Jenkins snapped on the second cuff. “See, that was easy. Let’s go back upstairs, see what’s what.”

On the way back up, Jenkins retrieved Nash’s bag. When they got back to the engineering office, Young, the security guard, was sitting on an office chair, his hands cuffed behind him, while Booker was peering at a computer screen and chanting: “Those fuckers. Those fuckers. Those fuckers . . .”

Red lights flashed off the dim interior walls, and Jenkins said, “One runner, one bag, and the Eagan cops are here.”

Virgil said, “Leave Mr. Nash. Run down there and tell the cops to come on up, we’ll need them to transport these guys.”

Jenkins pushed Nash into another office chair, as Young said, “Listen, I don’t know what this is all about.”

Nash said, “Shut up. Keep your mouth shut. We want an attorney. You don’t want to say another fuckin’ word, believe me. We can settle this.”

Young dropped his head, and said, “Okay.”

Booker, still peering at the computer: “If they were working through this file by file, they already got a lot. We need a major investigation here. We need to know what they’ve already taken out. We need to know who they were taking it out for.”

“Attorney,” Nash said.

“You’ll get an attorney,” Virgil said.

“You’re gonna need more than an attorney,” Booker shouted at Nash. “You’re gonna need a fuckin’ miracle. You’re going to
prison, you got that? So are the guys you’re selling this to. You’re all going to jail, you motherfucker!”

Virgil said, “Easy, there,” and he squatted and looked in the black bag. A Sony video camera was sitting on top of some bubble wrap, a GoPro, and some other gear.

“That’s private property,” Nash said.

“It’s burglary equipment,” Virgil said. “But I’m not going to mess with it. Because, you know, your prints are all over it. I wouldn’t want to smudge any of them.”

“We need to know what’s in the camera,” Booker said.

“We will,” Virgil said. “Not right now, though. We’ll turn this stuff over to the Eagan cops, let them transport these two to the Dakota County Jail and get with the prosecutors tomorrow. We have a lot of business with Mr. Nash. We’ll need you to come and look at the photos. I’ll call you in the morning after we know what we’re doing, let you know what time we can get together.”

“My whole life is in that camera,” Booker said. “These two need to go to prison. Forever.”

Young whined, “Mr. Booker . . .”

“Shut up,” Nash said.

Virgil smiled at Booker. “I even think we might have a cooperating witness.” He slapped Young on the back. “We’ll take care of you, Al. Don’t pay any attention to Boyd. He can’t help you. But we can.”

The Eagan cops came up. The cop in charge, a sergeant, looked at the two cuffed men, and then Virgil, and said, “Tell me everything.”

When the Eagan cops had taken Nash and Young away, Virgil said to Jenkins, “We’ve got to go back to Nash’s place. We need to see if there’s anybody there. We need to grab his home computers and any paper we can find that might tie him to Quill. We’ll probably have to sleep in the cars until we can get a search warrant.”

Booker asked, “Who’s Quill?”

“He might have been another one of Nash’s targets,” Virgil said.

“What about my place?”

“We’ll look for that, too. We’ll see if we can spot who the buyer was, if he already had one. If we see anything that looks right, we’ll call you for identification,” Virgil said. “What you should do now is go home and go back to bed.”

“I won’t sleep,” Booker said. “You don’t know how bad this is.”

“Try to sleep. I’ll set us up with the Dakota County Attorney’s Office tomorrow morning. They’ll want to talk to you and you’ll
want to be sharp,” Virgil said. “Nash might be prepared for something like this, might have a lawyer ready to launch.”

“I’ll call my legal guys tonight, we’ll all be there tomorrow,” Booker said. “Anytime you say. I’ll lock this place down before you leave. I’ll call the security company and have them send some guys over here to patrol the parking lot.”

As they were leaving, Virgil asked Booker, “How’d he get into your computers? Don’t you have them protected?”

“That’s one thing we need to find out right away,” Booker said. “They all have passwords, of course, that are supposed to be restricted to the engineers. The one he was on wasn’t assigned to one guy; it’s used by people like me who come through here but don’t actually work in this office. While we change the passwords every month, several people have the password for that particular computer.”

“Then you might have another leak. Besides the guard.”

Booker thought about that for a moment, then shook his head. “Probably not. If it was an engineer, he could have worked a little late—which is common enough—loaded all the information onto one flash drive, and carried it out. Since Nash had to be here, I suspect somebody like Allen was standing in the corner with his cell phone in his hand, set to video, recording keystrokes when somebody signed on to the computer.”

“I will check with Allen,” Virgil said. “About that thumb drive thing: that sounds a lot easier than taking pictures of a video screen with a camera. Why didn’t Nash do that?”

“Because when you plug a thumb drive in, there’s an on-screen prompt that asks for some ID information, which is different for each engineer. Couldn’t make movies of that unless you were standing right behind the guy who was inputting.”

Virgil and Jenkins drove back to Nash’s, parked in the driveway, leaned on the doorbell. No answer.

Virgil called the Edina police, asked for help. The duty officer said they could cruise the house every half hour or so, but they were working a bad pedestrian accident and didn’t have a lot of flexibility. Virgil told them there’d be two cars in the driveway and maybe somebody asleep on the front porch.

“Who’s going to sleep on the front porch?” Jenkins asked when Virgil was off the phone.

“One of us,” Virgil said. “We can’t let this get away. I’m going to slap crime scene tape on all the doors, then you can have a sleeping bag and air mattress and sleep on the porch or a yoga mat and Army blanket and sleep in the back of my truck. Your choice.”

Jenkins took the sleeping bag and air mattress and porch. Virgil slapped crime scene tape on the doors and crawled into the back of the truck, got a solid four hours, before his phone/alarm rang at seven-thirty. He called Trane.

“Gimme a break, I don’t wake up for a half hour,” Trane said. Then: “Something happen?”

He told her about the arrest from the night before and that he’d been sleeping in the driveway at Nash’s house. “We need a search warrant quick as we can get it, I mean, like, right now. You’d know better how to get one fast outta Hennepin County. I’ll give you the details.”

As he was doing that, Jenkins walked up, yawning, said, “I’m going to a Starbucks. Coffee?”

“Hot chocolate and a couple of bagels.”

“My breath could slay a dragon,” Jenkins said, as he wandered away to his car.

Virgil called the Dakota County Attorney’s Office at eight o’clock, talked to the chief assistant county attorney, whose name was Don Wright, and explained the situation. “This sounds heavy,” Wright said when Virgil had finished. “I’ll call Mr. Booker now. Let’s tentatively plan to meet at ten o’clock. This is the Stuart Booker from Sunfish Lake, right? Stuart and Andi?”

“Yes. You know them?”

“I know of them,” Wright said. “The Bookers are well known in, uh, what you might call political donation circles.”

“Sounds like Boyd Nash might have stepped in it,” Virgil said.

“If he goes to trial anywhere in Minnesota, he has. In it up to his chin.”

Jenkins came back with hot chocolate, bagels and cream cheese; he’d stopped at a drugstore, where he got two toothbrush-and-paste travel sets for three dollars each. They got water from an exterior faucet and brushed their teeth, and Jenkins said, “Now, if the cheeks of my ass weren’t stuck together, I’d feel almost human.”

They had the search warrant by a few minutes after eight-thirty, Trane and a computer tech from the Minneapolis crime lab turning up in separate cars, along with two cops who specialized in
searches. Jenkins forced the front door, and, inside, they found three computers: a desktop and two laptops. Both the laptops were ThinkPads, nothing like the one stolen from Quill’s carrel. All were password-protected. The technician took all three computers out to his car for transport back to Minneapolis.

“This is your first priority,” Trane told the technician. “Don’t let anyone bother you about other jobs. If they do, call me. Be best if you could crack these by, say, noon.”

Nash also had three two-drawer file cabinets in his home office, filled with papers, apparently going back several years, in not very neat file folders, and envelopes. Among the files, Virgil found a bound copy of Nash’s most recent income tax returns and, among them, 1099s from five separate companies, none of which Virgil had ever heard of.

He called Booker, who picked up instantly. “Virgil. We’re meeting at ten.”

“You sound a little wired,” Virgil said.

“No, I’m a lot wired. I’m sitting here with my attorneys. We’re going to nail this asshole to the cross.”

Virgil said, “I’m going to read you five names . . .”

He did, and with the fourth Booker shouted, “Wait. Boardman? B-o-a-r-d-m-a-n?”

“Boardman Chemicals.”

“That’s the one, those fuckers,” Booker shouted. “They’re going down! They’re going down!”

At nine o’clock, a young woman in a suit and carrying a briefcase turned up at the door. She represented Nash, she said. Trane gave
her a copy of the search warrant, which the young woman said was illegally broad and not soundly based.

Trane smiled at her, and said, “Your client was caught red-handed inside the Surface Research building at two-thirty this morning accessing confidential files and photographing them. He’s toast. If you would like to sit and watch the search, you’re welcome to. But we’re allowed to look anywhere there might be computer files hidden, and, as you know, they can be hidden on a thumb drive. We’re going to take the house down to the studs.”

At nine-thirty, Jenkins went home to sleep. And as the search continued, Trane took Virgil aside and told him that nothing she’d found in her further research into Robin Jones suggested that he might have killed Quill. “That’s not going anywhere. I’d give you an in-depth explanation, if you want it, but it’s not going anywhere. He didn’t do it.”

“Alibi?”

“Yeah, he’s got an alibi, and a witness—a woman he’s seeing. She spent the night. She’s a law clerk, smart enough to know not to lie, at least for Jones’s sake.”

“All right. Let’s keep him in mind, but . . . All right,” Virgil said. “I’m telling you, we haven’t seen one fuckin’ thing here that points at Quill or the university. We know Nash made some moves, and was even in the library, but I can’t find anything to back it up. No references to any medical companies, nothing on the tax returns.”

“If he killed Quill, there’s a good chance that he’d have wiped away any evidence of it. Stopped what he was doing and walked away,” Trane said.

“True. Probably have to take a deeper look at his client list, see
who he might have been talking to, who’d be interested in stuff coming out of Quill’s lab.” Virgil looked at his watch. “I’ve got to run down to Dakota County for this meeting. I’ll see if I can get with Nash, see what he has to say for himself.”

“He’s pretty lawyered up . . .”

“He won’t deal anyway,” Virgil said. “Trying to get a break on Surface Research in exchange for taking the bullet for a murder? No way. I’ll talk to him, see if we can eliminate him. Or not. Not would be interesting.”

The meeting with the prosecutors didn’t take long. Stuart Booker was treated with deference, but it stopped well short of actual slobbering. They knew who he was and who his friends were, but it wasn’t that huge a deal, just huge enough to ensure that both Boyd Nash and Allen Young were denied immediate bail on grounds that they might destroy evidence in the computer files.

Virgil asked to interview Nash but Nash refused to budge, instead referring Virgil to his attorney, a man named George Wesley. Wesley, as it happened, had visited Nash in the fortress-like Dakota County Jail. He was on the way back to his office in the Twin Cities when Virgil called him with the interview request.

“I won’t let him do it today, not until he’s out on bail and back at his house,” Wesley told Virgil. “If you want to submit written questions, I’ll consider them.”

“There’s something going on here that you don’t know about. What if I came by your office for an off-the-record chat?”

After a moment, Wesley, who was still in his car, said, “I could do that. You won’t get much from me, but I could do that.”

Virgil said good-bye to Booker and headed back north to Edina, where Wesley had his office in a neatly kept brick building that was full of law offices. A secretary emailed Wesley that Virgil was in the office; Wesley, who was apparently no more than twenty feet away through a couple of walls, came out and waved Virgil into his office.

“I can’t imagine why we need this conference,” he said with a friendly smile as they shook hands, “since I’m not going to give you anything.”

Virgil took a chair as Wesley, a thin, pale man with a shock of blond hair, sat behind his desk.

“Here’s the thing. What your client was doing to Mr. Booker was rotten, and I don’t care about it. Or I do a little bit, enough to send Mr. Nash to prison for a while. What I care about is another case I’m working on, the murder of professor Barthelemy Quill at the University of Minnesota.”

Wesley sat back. “Wait a minute. You’re saying that my client is a suspect in that case?”

“That’s a little strong, but we know he made a couple of passes at Quill’s lab and some of Quill’s associates. Other physicians. We also know that he was actually in the Wilson Library, near Quill’s carrel, sometime in the weeks before Quill’s murder there. What we need to do is eliminate Nash as a suspect, if that can be done. If it can’t, then we’ll be considerably more interested in him.”

Wesley thought about that for a moment, then said, “You want an alibi?”

“If he’s got one. We’d look into it,” Virgil said. “Otherwise, we’ll start looking at him for the murder.”

“Give me some details on the Quill case,” Wesley said. “I’ll talk to Boyd and get back to you. I’m not saying we’ll provide an alibi, but I’ll talk to him about whether we might be willing to cooperate at all.”

“Fair enough,” Virgil said. “If you want to make a couple of notes . . . Dr. Quill was killed three Fridays ago, very likely around midnight on Friday . . .”

After leaving Wesley’s office, Virgil was feeling wonky from a lack of sleep and food, so he stopped at McDonald’s for salt, grease, and carbohydrates, and then headed back to the hotel for a nap. He’d been in his room for five minutes when Wesley called back.

“Mr. Nash said that you have all the evidence you need to clear him. That’s all he has to say.”

“Huh. That could be taken in a couple of different ways.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of the relevant one,” Wesley said.

Virgil called Trane. “What’s happening with Nash’s computers?”

“Don’t know. I can check.”

He told her about Wesley’s statement, and said, “I think they’re sending us a signal without admitting to anything. I think they’re telling us that something in the files will indicate that Nash was down at Surface Research that Friday night. We’d been told he’d gone there several times, that he went on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights late, when nobody was working.”

“We’re going to provide him with an alibi?”

“I think that’s what they’re signaling,” Virgil said.

“I’ll get with the techs. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go take a nap, then pack up my dirty clothes and head home. I’ll be back on Monday.”

“Goddamnit, I feel like we’ve got all kinds of possibilities. But it’s, like, trying to squeeze Jell-O, if you know what I mean.”

“I do. Let’s take a break and think about it.”

They agreed to meet Monday morning in Trane’s office.

Virgil shaved, showered, and dropped on the bed and was asleep in five minutes. He woke up groggy, looked at the clock: almost six. He was thinking about Frankie: he needed to call her. He was fishing around on the night stand for his phone when it rang. He picked it up and looked at the screen: no caller ID.

He answered with “Virgil Flowers . . .”

A woman screamed at him, “Brett’s dead! He’s dead. Right here.”

After a moment of confusion, he thought: Megan Quill. Brett was the sleepy, bare-assed dude. “Easy,” Virgil said. “How do you know he’s dead?”