Bloody Genius

by John Sandford

  “You’re teaching yourself to kill people?”

  May snorted. “If I was gonna kill somebody, I’d use a fuckin’ gun. If I had a gun.”

  “Okay. I’m told you study Zen.”

  “I do. That’s another thing women kinda like, you know? Seems all mystical and so on, like you’re spiritual. What I picked up in Japan was, Zen is about as mystical as dirt. But, it’s still cool.”

  “‘Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills,’” Virgil said, quoting Napoleon Dynamite.

  “That movie was about my life: guys with skills,” May said. “I got skills, but no girls—not right now anyway.”

  “How about ever?” Virgil asked.

  May scratched his neck. “Oh, yeah. They come, but then they go. Know what I mean? One day they’re sitting on your couch, the next day the couch is empty.”

  He made Virgil laugh.

  * * *

  —

  Virgil asked May if he might have any idea of who had killed Quill. He didn’t, and he didn’t think it would be anyone in Cultural Science. “The people in the department would talk about it for eight years before they could do anything like that. They’re not people who act on impulse. If they saw somebody coming after them with an ax, they’d try to get the guy to discuss it rationally instead of running away.”

  He didn’t have a suspect, but he did have a thought.

  “It was a big deal when Quill got killed, even around Cultural Science,” May said. “We wondered if the cops would come after us. A couple days later, Sergeant Trane showed up. After she talked to me, I got to thinking. Why did Quill have a carrel at the Wilson Library, on the west bank, and why did he keep a huge, heavy computer there?”

  “I’m listening,” Virgil said. “Why did he?”

  May said, “I don’t know, but it might help if you figured it out. Listen, he’s a medical guy. We have a medical library here on the east bank. As far as I know, there are no medical books in the Wilson Library. He supposedly did some engineering work, too, in robotics, and the engineering library is over here. The university hospitals are here on the east bank, and he probably had an office there. I’m sure he had a private office at his lab—all those guys do. I understand his house is on the east bank. He has all kinds of private places and study possibilities over here, why did he go over there? You ever walk across the Mississippi footbridge in the winter? You can freeze your nuts off. Why did he have a little tiny carrel?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll think about it.”

  “Here’s what I’m thinking. He went there because it was quiet and he was away from everybody else. Like, you know, where you want to think. This little Zen space is not your house. It’s not your lab, you don’t need to talk to anybody, you’ve got no TV to interrupt you. You want a clear, calm mind to digest it all. Then somebody . . . I’m thinking Russians or Chinese . . . Could be a big American corporation . . .”

  Virgil: “Russians? Or Chinese?”

  “Sure. You must have read about it. They’ve got all these guys out there stealing American technology, and what’s more high-tech than medicine? Especially the kind that Quill was doing? Quill’s over there generating ideas, and tech, and somebody finds out about it, Russians or Chinese, computer experts. They start going over there to monitor that computer—maybe they have the computer secretly spooling up all of Quill’s input. Now he finds out that somebody is messing with his computer and knows they do it late at night because they need to do it when nobody’s there. He thinks it’s somebody from his lab, or a student, and he goes over to surprise the guy. And he gets the surprise instead.”

  “That does sort of hold together,” Virgil admitted.

  “Yeah, it does,” May said. “It has the massive disadvantage of being too complicated. It fucks over Occam and his razor. It’s possible that Quill was doing something online that he didn’t want to risk any chance of being traced to him. You know, watching porn and yanking the crank. Maybe buying dope on the dark net. Here’s a big question: was the guy who killed him in on whatever he was doing?”

  They spent a couple of minutes speculating, came up with nothing solid. Virgil thanked him, gave him a card, walked back to his car, and then called Trane to tell her about May’s thought—not about the Russians and Chinese, or Quill yanking his crank, but the question of why he’d even have an office at the Wilson Library.

  “A good question,” she conceded. “I wondered about that, too, but he was such a hotshot that I figured he could get an office anywhere he wanted one. So he got one there, maybe on a whim. Maybe his work took him across the river sometimes and he wanted a private place to rest his feet. I dunno.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil rang off and went to find Terry Foster, the military veteran. Foster lived across the city line in St. Paul.

  As he drove, he thought about what both May and Trane had said and decided that Trane’s assumption was weak. If it was simply the casual exercise of academic power by Quill to get an extra office, what about the fact he probably had a library key? That would have taken more than clout: he’d have to have an illegal source for it. He’d probably have to evade janitors and other night workers if he didn’t want to be seen. There was more to the carrel than met the eye . . .

  But Russians and Chinese? Unlikely.

  * * *

  —

  Terry Foster lived in a tiny, stuccoed rental house in the area of St. Paul called Frogtown. A couple of aging birch trees shaded the neatly kept front yard, where a sidewalk of cracked concrete blocks led to an enclosed front porch. Virgil parked, knocked on the front door. There was no reaction from inside, but, as he was standing there, a man came out on the porch of the house next door, and said, “There’s nobody home.”

  “Do you know when Mr. Foster will be back?”

  The man said, “No. He’s in the hospital.”

  Virgil walked over—a matter of twenty feet—identified himself, and asked, “He’s sick?”

  “He got mugged, right in our own alley,” the man said. “Somebody beat the sweet livin’ bejesus out of him the night before last.”

  According to the neighbor, Foster’s house had a single-car garage in the back, which wasn’t part of his rental deal. He had, instead, a parking space in the yard next to the garage. “When he got out of his car, some guy was waiting for him. Jumped out from behind the garage and beat him up. Terry was yelling for help, and the neighbor in back, Joe Lee, heard him and ran out and started yelling at the guy, who run off. Joe run out there and found Terry and called the cops. I didn’t hear him yelling, but I heard the ambulance, and I run out there and saw them put him in the ambulance. And he was a mess. He looked like he’d been blown up.”

  “How do you know that part about the guy jumping out from behind the garage?”

  “It was in the Pioneer Press. I guess they got it from the cops,” the man said.

  Foster had been taken to Regions Hospital, the neighbor said. When Virgil asked, he said that Foster lived alone, as far as he knew. “He did drink a little. There’s a street guy who goes around and takes aluminum cans out of the garbage and he told me once that Terry’s was good for thirty or forty cans. I guess he was drinking a six-pack a day.”

  When the neighbor ran out of information, Virgil walked around behind the house to look at the garage. The thing had probably been designed and built before World War II and would be a tight fit for any modern car. There was an overhead door facing the alley and a door on the end closest to the house for access, with a graveled parking spot to one side. Two tall, aging arborvitae stood on either side of the access door, a good spot to hide if you were planning to ambush whoever parked on the graveled spot.

  But no self-respecting mugger would have done that. If you got behind or between the arborvitae, you wouldn’t be seen from anywhere but the back window of the house. B
ut if anyone saw you sneak in there, there’d be no excuse, either. And if they called the cops, you’d never see them coming.

  As Virgil was walking around the garage, a man came out on the back porch of the house across the alley, and called, “Who are you?”

  Virgil called back, “State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Are you Joe Lee?”

  “That’s me.” Lee came down from his porch and across the alley. “Have you found out anything?”

  Virgil shook his head. “I haven’t started looking yet. It’s a St. Paul case, I’m looking to see if it ties into something else I’m investigating.”

  “Really.” Lee was a brawny, sunburned man who might have been a heavy-equipment operator, probably in his late fifties or early sixties. “I figured there had to be something else going on. The guy had him on the ground, never did try for his billfold. He just kept pounding him—Terry.”

  “You ever see anyone who looked like they were scouting the alley? Somebody who shouldn’t have been here?”

  “No . . . nobody but Terry’s girlfriend. I saw her a couple times, in the mornings—I guess she stayed over.”

  Virgil thought: Katherine Green? He asked, “What’d the girlfriend look like?”

  “Like, I don’t know, a woodpecker.”

  “A woodpecker?”

  “Tall, thin, red hair—she wore it up in a thing, a peak, on top of her head. Like a pileated woodpecker.”

  “Good description,” Virgil said. It couldn’t be Green. “The attack . . . You don’t have any idea of what that might have been about?”

  “Nope. I talked to Terry once in a while, when we were taking out the garbage at the same time. Seemed like a nice enough guy. I didn’t really know him, though.”

  Lee had nothing more to say, and Virgil walked back around the house. The next-door neighbor was still standing there, keeping an eye out for Virgil. He asked, “Do I have to worry about it?”

  Virgil said, “I don’t think so. Looks to me like whoever did it was targeting Mr. Foster.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil gave the neighbor a card and drove five minutes over to Regions Hospital, where he’d spent a few hundred hours as a St. Paul cop, both as an investigator and as a patient.

  When he asked at the emergency room desk, he was told that Foster had been moved to a regular room; he was conscious and expected to recover. Virgil got the room number, and as he went up in the elevator, it occurred to him to wonder why neither Katherine Green nor Clete May had mentioned the attack on Foster.

  The easy answer was: they didn’t know about it. But he’d ask.

  * * *

  —

  Foster was a mess.

  He might have been a good-looking guy, perhaps an inch under six feet tall and in good shape, but now he had bandages wrapped around his head, completely covering one eye and one ear, and what Virgil could see of his face, as he lay propped up in the hospital bed, was heavily bruised and abraded; he also had a plastic brace covering his nose. Both of his arms, which were in casts that left nothing exposed except his fingertips, were tethered to an overhead rack and suspended.

  The one eye that was visible turned toward Virgil, and Foster croaked, “Who are you?”

  Virgil told him, and then said, “I was looking for you over at your house. I wanted to talk to you about the Quill murder. Now I’m wondering if what happened to you had anything to do with that?”

  “Don’t know,” Foster croaked. “Could you hold that water bottle so I could get a drink?”

  There was a plastic cup on the bed tray with a bent plastic straw sticking out of it, and Virgil held it while Foster drank. When he’d had enough, his tongue flicked out to wet his lips, and he said, “Thanks. Least that asshole didn’t bust my teeth . . . I don’t know why this happened. I did three tours in Iraq and Syria, I even got wounded, but I wasn’t hurt this bad.”

  All he knew about his attacker was that he was a white man—he’d seen his forearms—and that he was about average height and a little heavy. “The police are calling it a mugging, but I’ll tell you what: he was trying to kill me. That’s how my arms got broken. I kept putting them up so he couldn’t hit me in the head. He had a club—like a nightstick or something, like a police baton. He never tried to get my wallet, but that was maybe because I was screaming my head off, and then Joe Lee was yelling at him and he took off.”

  They talked about it for a while, and Foster was insistent that there was no major drama in his life. He didn’t have a full-time girlfriend, he said, but he wasn’t gay, either, nor was he Jewish or Islamic, and the attack was white on white, so it wasn’t a random hate crime. He’d gone to the Green lecture, where the fight started, but said he’d tried to break it up and hadn’t hit anyone. “It’s all on that video they got, you can see for yourself.”

  “You say you don’t have a girlfriend. When I was over at your house, a neighbor mentioned a girl. Had you recently broken up with someone?”

  Foster said, “No . . . I don’t . . . Oh, somebody must have seen Sandy. She’s not a girlfriend, she’s just a friend from the U. She’s stayed over a couple of times, but we’re not dating. We’re both up front about that.”

  “Women are sometimes less up front than men are. I mean, you think everything is up front but—”

  Foster waved him off. “No, no. She drinks a little too much, I drink a little too much, and sometimes when we’ve both drunk a little too much and we’re both feeling a little horny, she’ll stay over. When we’re both sober, then we’re not attached.”

  “There’s not another boyfriend who’d be unhappy about those sleepovers?”

  “No. She says not, and she’s telling the truth.” And he asked, “Why are you talking to me anyway? Did somebody say something?”

  Virgil said, “Because you’re a military vet, which means that you’re familiar with violence. You might even have done some.”

  “Well, Jesus, man, I was in the Army,” Foster said.

  “So was I,” Virgil said, “I was an MP captain, and I did some violence myself. And I have as a cop. I don’t think your history is a big deal, but when you’re trying to figure out who might have done some violence, you gotta ask around about who might be capable of it.”

  Foster thought about that for a moment, then said, “Yeah, I guess.”

  A nurse stuck her head in, glanced at Virgil, then asked Foster, “Do you need the bathroom?”

  “Not now,” he said. “Ask me in an hour. My arms are starting to ache again.”

  “I’ll talk to you in an hour.”

  When she was gone, Foster said, “They don’t like to give me painkillers because they think I’ll become a raging junkie. They can’t see the pain, so they ignore it.”

  He had not killed Quill, he said, had never seen Quill at the library, and hadn’t known what he looked like until the confrontation at Green’s lecture.

  He was a Cultural Science major, he said, because when he got out of the Army and started at the university, he hadn’t yet figured out exactly what he wanted to do. “I took a whole bunch of classes, a bunch of hours, scattered over a bunch of subjects, and what I found out was that a lot of them were acceptable in Cultural Science. I signed up for Cultural Science because I could use credits I’d already piled up toward a degree. To tell the truth, a lot of Cultural Science is like a magic show. I don’t understand how anybody could believe the shit some of those professors tell you. Even professor Green, she’s sorta out there. But, she’s got some nice . . . Well, hell . . .”

  Virgil nodded. “I noticed that. You got something going there?”

  Foster gave his head a half shake. “You know, she’s only, like, thirty-four. Same age as I am. I screwed around for a couple years after school, and then I went down to the recruiting office and signed up. I was in for eight, thinking I might go lifer, b
ut after that last tour in Syria I bailed.”

  “Hit hard?”

  “Not so bad. Got shot in the thigh. Didn’t do a lot of damage, through and through, but made me think I might want to do something safer, especially since they keep sending you back and back and back,” Foster said. “I’m still in the reserve. If the college thing doesn’t work out, the Army would let me back in, at the same rank and with credit for time served. What I’m saying is, I wound up in Cultural Science, and Katherine’s got that hot bod and she’s my age and not hooked up with anybody. I went to India with her last year, and there were a couple of times when I got the feeling that she liked my looks. You know, Dr. Foster’s female cure.”

  “Nothing happened?”

  “I’m sorta retarded that way,” Foster said. He tried to smile but winced instead. “I got a girl knocked up in high school, she had an abortion, and everybody was yelling at me. I’ve been pretty wary about commitments ever since. But I had the feeling a couple times, in India, that if I reached out and patted her on the ass, she wouldn’t have complained. I’ve got that feeling right now, though this whole mugging thing didn’t do much for my looks. Goddamn near ripped off one of my ears. When I get out of here, I might have a talk with her . . . about things. I’m thirty-four, time’s a-wastin’.”

  “I talked to Dr. Green yesterday. She didn’t mention anything about you being attacked.”

  Foster tried to shrug, mostly failed, winced again. “I didn’t tell anybody except my folks, and they live up in Black Duck. Nobody to tell her about it.”

  Foster said he had no idea of who might have killed Quill. “There was a lot of hostility between him and the people in Cultural Science, and there are some goofy people in the department, but I can’t say that any of them seem like killers.”