Bloody Genius (27 page)

“No, no,” Trane said. “You saying that could probably get me thrown out of the police department. ‘Yeah, Trane got a teenager
to fuck the suspect into a confession.’ Jesus. I get goose bumps thinking about it.”

There were footsteps coming up the stairs as the tech was going down, and they heard him say, “Excuse me,” and Quill looked out the door, and said, “Hi, Mom.”

Out on the street, shadows cast by the setting sun spreading across the lawns, Virgil said to Trane, “I’m gonna get a steak. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“My husband’s at a doctors’ party,” she said, “talking about the lower intestinal tract. And maybe the upper intestinal tract. Telling proctologist jokes . . . Why don’t you buy
me
a steak?”

“An Applebee’s steak?”

“That’s not as classy as it might be, but I’ll take it.”

They drove separately to the hotel, found a line at the Applebee’s, went over to the beer joint—which actually had a name, The Beacon—ordered steaks, and beer for Virgil and wine for Trane while they waited, and talked about the case for a few minutes, what they considered a near miss with Krause. The steaks came, and they’d almost finished them when the BCA tech guy called.

When he identified himself, Virgil blurted, “Jeez, I’m sorry, I forgot—”

“Krause’s phone just went dark,” the tech guy broke in.

“What?”

“It disappeared.”

“Where?”

“He was just turning south on Highway 61 up by White Bear.”

“Oh, Jesus.” He looked at Trane. “It’s Krause. He’s going after her.”

Trane yanked her phone out of her purse and punched some buttons, and then said, “Ah, no. We told her to turn her phone off. We told her . . . She hasn’t turned it back on.”

“What’s her mom’s name?” Virgil asked.

“I . . . I don’t know. I doubt it’s Quill. I think she remarried . . .”

“We gotta go,” Virgil said. “We gotta go.”

They went together in Virgil’s truck, lights and siren. Virgil took three seconds to dig his Glock out of the backseat gun safe. “I might need this, God help me.”

Trane was on her cell, trying to track down Quill’s mother’s name, without luck. Virgil was on his own hands-free phone, talking with the BCA tech guy.

“We might have a desperate situation here. If we can’t track Krause, we’ve got to see if we can locate a Megan Quill. I have her phone number but I don’t know which service.”

“I’ll find her.”

“Gotta be fast. Gotta go, man.”

“Where’re you going, where’re you going?” Trane snapped at Virgil, pulling her face away from her phone. “You’re going the wrong way.”

Virgil said, “I’m not taking city streets. Even with the lights, they’ll be slower. I’m going over on 94 and then up 35E.”

Trane said, “Okay, I see . . . Go! . . . Go! . . . I can’t get anybody to tell me her mother’s name. It must be somewhere.”

“St. Thomas probably has it.”

Virgil fought his way out to I-94 and sped east toward St. Paul as Trane, who tried to talk to somebody at St. Thomas, wound up shouting, “So I’ll have the fuckin’ nine-one-one operator call you. Jesus, this is . . .”

She hung up, called 911, identified herself, explained the situation, and gave the operator the number for the woman she had spoken to at St. Thomas. The operator said she’d call back after she talked with St. Thomas.

Virgil was trying to drive fast and thumb-dial his car phone, got it done, talked to the BCA duty officer. “Call the Faribault cops and have them check the house of one Connie Krause. If she’s home, check to see if her son has her car and, if so, the make, model, and license. This is an emergency. We need the information as fast as we can get it.”

Virgil got stuck behind a pair of cars pacing each other side by side at exactly fifty-five miles an hour. He got the truck’s bumper a foot behind the Prius’s in the fast lane and laid on the horn in case the idiot didn’t hear the siren or see the flashing lights, and the Prius reluctantly sped up and moved over, and Virgil hammered on by, and Trane, clutching her phone, said, “I’ve never driven a hundred and ten down I-94 in the middle of the Cities . . . Kinda pretty, the way all the lights blur.”

“Where in the hell is nine-one-one? Where in the hell . . .”

He blew past a five-liter Mustang.

Nothing but silence from their phones until Virgil’s buzzed, as he turned north on I-35E in St. Paul, and the BCA phone came up, and the tech said, “I’ve got your girl, but she’s not in White Bear Lake. She’s moving, she’s on Highway 61 going south from White Bear toward 694. She could be with Krause, but I think she’s ahead of him.”

“Stay on her. We’re just north of 94, heading north on 35E, and we should run into her if she keeps coming south.”

“Yeah, she’s coming up to the intersection of 61 and 694. If she heads your way . . .” A minute later, the tech said, “No, she’s turned east on 694. She’s going away from you. She moving pretty fast . . . Got a heavy foot.”

Trane’s phone buzzed, and the 911 operator came up. “Quill’s mother’s name is Trixie Hahn. I have her home and cell phone numbers.”

Trane called Hahn’s cell phone. She answered after a few seconds, and Trane identified herself, and said, “We’re trying to find Megan. We think she might be in danger. Do you know where she’s going?”

Hahn, sounding frightened: “She’s meeting a friend at the Maplewood Mall. What happened? Why—”

“We think a man who she believes is a friend might pose a danger. We’re tracking her phone, though it’s turned off. We can see her going east on 694.”

“Yes! She’s going to the mall. The Maplewood Mall. She’s meeting Kaitlin Chambers there, Kaitlin’s a friend from way back in kindergarten.”

“She’s driving your car?”

“Yes.”

“Give me a description, please.”

“It’s a one-year-old green Subaru Forester, sort of a moss green . . . Wait a minute, I’ve got the insurance paper, I can get you a license number.”

Hahn went away from the phone for a moment, and Virgil asked Trane, “I know where the mall is, but how far do you think we’re behind her?”

“Six or eight minutes . . . We’re probably ten minutes from the mall. Maybe. Shoot, I don’t know, I’ve only been there, like, twice in my life.”

Hahn came back with the license plate number, and Trane thanked her and told her that she’d call back later when she had more information. She punched off Hahn’s call and dialed 911 again, and told the operator to contact the Maplewood police to find and stop the Subaru as it approached the mall or in the mall parking lot and to hold and secure Quill.

She called Hahn again. “Do you have a phone number for this Kaitlin, Megan’s friend?”

“No, no, I don’t.”

“Okay . . . We’ll check back.”

A few minutes later, Virgil rocketed through the intersection of I-35E with I-694, heading east, and Trane, who was now doing something with her phone’s map app, said, “We’re maybe three or four miles out. Take the White Bear Avenue exit. The mall’s right there.”

There was traffic, and while it did move aside, they were slowed down anyway. The four miles seemed like they took forever, a bit less than three minutes, before they came off the entrance ramp and charged across the intersection into the mall parking lot. As they did, they got a call from the 911 operator. “We’ve got Maplewood calling back. They’ve located Quill’s car in the west parking lot.”

“We’re coming into the west parking lot now,” Trane said. “Tell them to turn on their flashers.”

A few seconds later, the flashers popped on, and Virgil steered around the aisles of parking slots to the Maplewood police car, where a single cop was standing, and Virgil and Trane piled out of the truck.

Virgil: “Any sign of her?”

The cop shook his head. “No. I spotted the car pretty quick because the door was open. Her purse is inside.”

Trane: “Purse?” She turned to Virgil. “He’s got her. He grabbed her. He’s going to kill her.”

Virgil said, “He’s probably got his mother’s car. He doesn’t have one of his own.” To the cop, he said, “His mother is Connie, or maybe Constance, Krause, of Faribault.”

The Maplewood cop slid back inside his car, and, a moment later, said, “Okay, I got her. I’ll get the information out, we’ll get all the local departments and the patrol looking for it . . . A 2017 silver Chrysler.”

And as they stood there, Virgil took a call from the BCA duty officer, who said, “The Faribault cops checked with Mrs. Krause. Her car is parked outside her house.”

Virgil: “Damn! Damn! Now what?”

Trane was inside Quill’s car, backed out, and said, “Her phone is gone. She’s still got it.”

“What?” Virgil went back to the phone tech. “You still see Quill’s phone?”

“Yeah. You’re right on top of her. I mean, a few blocks. She’s not moving now.”

“Where? Where is she?”

“Go south on White Bear a couple blocks to Beam Avenue,
take a left. There’s a park there. Let me see . . . Maplewood Heights Park—”

“We’re right there,” the Maplewood cop said. He hustled around his car, and shouted, “C’mon. Follow me!”

Jerry Krause backed the unfamiliar car out of the garage carefully, easing it into the street, watching the nearby houses for anything that looked like an alarm. He didn’t see anything. He drove back to Megan Quill’s apartment, planning to take her out—at knifepoint, if necessary. He got there just in time to see Quill get in the car with her mother.

He went after them.

He tracked them out to I-94, allowing them to get well ahead in the lane three lanes to his left. The ride to Quill’s mother’s house in White Bear Lake took half an hour. He’d been there twice. He watched as they left the car in the driveway. Quill had told him that she was meeting a girlfriend to go to the mall. He wasn’t sure which mall that was, but he could wait.

The wait wasn’t long. At a quarter to seven, Megan Quill walked out of the house and got in the car, backed out of the driveway, and drove past him out toward Highway 61. He followed, down 61, remembering then to cloak his phone with the Faraday bag, and onto I-694 East toward the Maplewood Mall. He’d been to the mall twice, both times with Quill: it was her go-to shopping destination. The possibilities played through his mind; his best bet, he decided, would be to take her in the parking lot.

He could probably kill her there, he thought, if there weren’t too many people around. The sight lines at a mall were always
broken up by the ranks of cars, especially the taller SUVs and pickups. Quill had to die, but her death wasn’t the only thing he wanted.

Krause moved closer, as she got off the highway at White Bear Avenue and drove into the crowded parking lot. He took the X-Acto knife out of his pocket; it had a cylindrical cover on the blade, and he pulled it off and dropped it on the passenger seat.

Quill slowed to a creeping pace, looking down the rows of parked cars for an empty space. When she spotted one, she rolled down the aisle, with Krause thirty feet behind her. She pulled into the empty slot, with a pickup on the mall side and an SUV on the other, and Krause stopped behind her car, blocking the view of his driver’s side with the SUV.

He picked up the X-Acto knife and popped his door, and when he saw the door of Quill’s car opening, he rushed it. She was still turning out of the driver’s seat and didn’t see Krause until he grabbed her hair, yanked her out of the car. She screamed, but not loud enough to attract attention—they were, at best, a hundred yards from the mall’s entrance—and he forced her to the ground and held the X-Acto knife in front of her eyes.

“We’re going for a drive,” he said. “If you scream or fight me, I swear to God I’ll cut your fuckin’ face off.”

“Jerry—”

“Shut up!” He dragged her by the hair, and she half screamed again, and tried to scrabble along behind him. He turned the corner at the front of the SUV and pushed her into the driver’s seat, then climbed in behind her and shoved her shoulders, forcing her over the center console, and said, “On the floor. On the fuckin’ floor!”

She dropped to the floor. He let go of her hair long enough to
switch the X-Acto knife to his right hand, now in front of her forehead where she could still see it, then quickly shifted the car into drive and started out of the parking lot.

“What are you doing?” Quill asked. She began to cry. “Why are you doing this?”

“You’re gonna tell the cops that you think I killed Brett. I can’t let you do that.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah, but I can’t let you tell.”

“You killed Brett?”

“He came busting into my room and saw me with the laptop. Nothing I could do about it. I told him I took it from your dad’s house when I heard he’d been killed. I said, ‘Why shouldn’t I get it if he’s never going to use it again?’ He said you told him the cops said the computer was stolen at the library and that the killer stole it. He said he’d talk to you in the morning. I couldn’t let him do that. I knew he was going out for some heroin that night, and he always slept for a long time when he did that. I also knew he usually got two or three hits at the same time, so, if he died in his sleep, it’s not like he couldn’t have overdosed—”

“Jerry, you killed your best friend—”

“—who was going to turn me in to the cops,” Krause said. “For murder. For an accident.”

They were out of the parking lot and around the corner in the park. There were some dog people there with lights around their necks, and Jerry took the SUV up on the walking path and around the lake.

“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

“Maybe, maybe not. One thing I’m going to do first is finally get in your pussy. And I’m gonna like it.”

“I won’t tell anybody.”

“You might be lying.”

“DNA.”

“Got that covered.”

He stopped the truck and grabbed her hair. “Come up out of there. Come across that console.” He popped the truck door and began dragging her out, and she was crying and half screaming, and he wrestled her out of the car, and she flopped onto the ground.

“Please don’t do this. Please!”

Virgil and Trane, in Virgil’s truck, slewed out of the parking lot behind the Maplewood cop. They ran fast through traffic a couple blocks, cornered left around a Walgreens, went another block to a left turn into an empty parking lot next to a basketball court. Just off the court, a half dozen people were throwing Frisbees in the twilight, with a half dozen dogs running around them, both dogs and people with multicolored lights around their necks, chasing down lighted disks.

Virgil got back to the BCA phone guy, who said, “I still see her phone, on the north side of the park.”

“No time to fuck around,” Virgil said to Trane. He shouted at the Maplewood cop, “We’re taking the trail. See if you can get more cops up here. Go around the other direction. Her phone is here in the park, but on the other side.”

The cop yelled back, “The trail goes around a lake.”

A hard-surfaced walking trail, wide enough for a car, went both left and right past the parking lot. Virgil went right, toward the people with the dogs. He stopped when he got to them. Trane
rolled her window down, and shouted, “Did a car just take the trail?”

“Yeah, a black SUV,” said a thin, bearded man. His dog woofed a couple of times as the man pointed farther to the right. “He went around the lake. We wondered—”

Virgil didn’t wait to hear any more, instead hammered the accelerator, leaving the dog people looking after them. The trail was perhaps ten feet wide and circled to the left. Clumps of trees, half visible in the growing darkness, dotted the banks of the small lake, and they were halfway around when they saw a black SUV pulled into the trees along the north shore.

Virgil: “That’s one of Quill’s cars. He took the Mercedes.”

Trane said, “Huh,” pulled her pistol, and pointed with her free hand. “Put me there, right next to the car.”

Virgil swerved off the trail onto the grass, aiming at the Mercedes. The car appeared to be empty, the offside door open, interior lights on, nobody on the close side. Trane popped her door, and when Virgil hit the brakes, she was out and running toward the black car. Virgil was out right behind her, running, and when Trane went left around the back of the truck, he went right.