Bloody Genius

by John Sandford

  “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.”

  “What?” Quill asked, as she backed into her front room. Virgil pulled the door closed, and they sat in separate easy chairs facing one another.

  Trane said, “Agent Flowers believes there’s a problem with the statement you gave to me about the recording I played for you.”

  Quill had been lying all right, Virgil thought. When Trane made the comment, he could see the pupils of Quill’s eyes contract, the way they do when somebody’s lying to your face. Trane saw it, too.

  Virgil said, “Several people who knew your husband quite well said there’s no doubt that it’s his voice on the recording. We’re wondering why you said it wasn’t.”

  Quill recoiled, said, “I did not—”

  Trane said, “Nancy, you can tell us you want a lawyer and kick us out or you can tell us the truth, but you can’t lie to us without serious consequences. You’re about to lie to us. Don’t lie. We can both see it because you’re no good at it.”

  After a moment, and with considerable frost in her voice, Quill said, “I have to make a phone call.”

  Virgil: “Go ahead.”

  * * *

  —

  Quill went back to a bedroom and shut the door. After a moment of silence, Trane said, “If we hear a gunshot, I’m making a run for it.”

  “You know her better than I do. She’s smart, right?”

  “Yes. She’s an associate professor of linguistics.”

  “When you played the recording for her, I’ll bet it meant something more than Barth Quill’s voice. Either she knew the other people on the recording or she knows the case they were talking about . . . or . . . something else that I can’t think of.”

  They speculated for a few minutes, then Quill reappeared, and said, “I talked to my attorney. He said I shouldn’t talk to you without him present, but he can’t come here tonight. He said we could talk tomorrow.”

  “What time?” Trane asked.

  “Ten o’clock, at his office in Minneapolis.”

  Trane looked at Virgil. “Can you make that?”

  “Sure. Will you be there?”

  “If I can. But this trial . . . I might not be able to make it.”

  * * *

  —

  Back outside, Trane asked, “You okay with handling this?”

  “I’m fine. And I’ve got some other running around I want to do.”

  “I was mostly interested in seeing Nancy’s first reaction,” Trane said. “We know she lied to me, but we don’t know why. If her attorney shuts her down tomorrow without any explanation, then we’ll have something to work with. Something on the Quill murder. On the other hand, maybe it’s just something embarrassing . . . Something sleazy.”

  “You could be right,” Virgil said. “I’ll push her about the recording. I’d like to know how old it is, who else is on it, if she has any idea about who they’re talking about, the guy Quill wanted to operate on. I’ll try to open her up. The woman I talked to in the lab said the recording would be important enough to kill for, if it’s recent. Although . . .”

  “What?”

  “If the recording was important enough to kill for, wouldn’t it be Quill who would have done the killing? Killing a blackmailer? The other guys on the recording were trying to talk him out of what he wanted to do.”

  “We don’t know what we’re talking about, Virgil. If the other men talked him out of the operation, refused to go along, then the recording’s not so important,” Trane said. “But if they did do it and the patient died, that’s something entirely different. You could argue that it was murder. The fact that Quill had apparently listened to the recording recently, or maybe even had just gotten it in the mail or something, suggests that the threat was active. Was real. Right now.”

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Virgil went back to the hotel, hit Applebee’s—Bourbon Street Steak, fries, lemonade—got a brew at the beer joint, where he found Harry sitting on a barstool talking to Alice, the barmaid.

  Virgil climbed up on the next stool, said, “Harry, Alice.”

  Harry said, “Another bottle of cow piss?”

  Virgil said, “Yep,” and Alice went away to get it.

  “Catch the kid yet?” Harry asked.

  “I investigated every one of them that I know about and they’re all clearly innocent,” Virgil lied. “Your theory sucks a hot desert wind.”

  “Haven’t found the right kid yet, that’s all,” Harry said. “Let me make another observation—also from the files of NCIS.”

  “Feel free,” Virgil said, as Alice delivered the Miller Lite.

  “Here’s the thing, Virgil: you’ve already met the killer.”

  “I’ve met the killer?”

  “Sure. Gibbs always meets the killer early in the show when he doesn’t know the other guy is the killer. Every single time,” Harry said.

  Virgil said, “Huh. Harry, I suspect that might have more to do with the story structure of the show. They can’t have Gibbs going along investigating and investigating, getting nowhere, and then pull the killer out of his butt at the last minute. If they did that, how would the audience even know that t
he bad guy was all that bad?”

  Harry shrugged. “All right, don’t believe me, but you’ll see. A murder investigation, as far as I can tell, is exactly like you see on a TV show.”

  “I told somebody a couple of days ago that a murder investigation is never like TV,” Virgil said.

  “Well, you’re wrong. You’ve got your cast of characters, and you know, going in, that one of them did it. If you’ve been investigating for weeks, you’ve already met the whole cast.”

  “We’re going to have to agree to disagree,” Virgil said.

  Alice had been listening in and she said to Virgil, “Okay, so I ask you this, Virgil. Did you ever investigate, like, a real mystery? Not somebody holding up a gas station or a liquor store? A real mystery?”

  “A few times,” Virgil said.

  “In any of those times,” she asked, “did you ever not meet el villano, el malo, before you know that he was el villano?”

  Virgil had to think a minute, then said, “You know, I guess I haven’t. I’m sure I will, but so far—”

  “Ha,” Harry said. “Now that you know that you’ve met the killer, you can probably figure this out before morning. For that, you owe me a beer.”

  Virgil looked at Alice, and asked, “Where is he on the beer total?”

  “Only two. After four, he recites this poem. That is not a good time to be here.”

  “That hurts, honey. Greatest poem ever written,” Harry said. He looked at Virgil. “‘The Cremation of Sam McGee.’”

  Virgil: “No.”

  “All of it,” Alicia said. “Unless the bouncer throws him out in the street.”

  “When I’m drinking wine, I can do all of ‘Gunga Din,’” Harry said. After a moment, he added, “And that’s about it. ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ and ‘Gunga Din.’”

  Virgil took a swallow of beer, leaned back in his chair, burped, and recited,

  “There are strange things done in the midnight sun

  By the men who moil for gold;

  The Arctic trails have their secret tales

  That would make your blood run cold;

  The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

  But the queerest they ever did see

  Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

  I cremated Sam McGee . . .”

  Alice crossed herself, and Harry gawked at him. “You know it all?”

  “Maybe after four beers. I memorized the whole thing for tenth-grade English,” Virgil said.

  Virgil wound up drinking three beers, one over his limit, and was a little tipsy when he decided to head up to his room. As he got off his stool, Harry clapped him on the back, and said, “You’re all right, Virgie. But you gotta remember that one thing.”

  “What’s that?” Virgil asked.

  “You’ve met the killer. Who’s a kid.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil took a hot shower, read the James Lee Burke book until one o’clock in the morning, and bagged out.

  He slept in the next morning, and when he did get up, he put on a fresh Cage the Elephant T-shirt, got out of the hotel at nine o’clock. He walked across the street for a bagel and a cup of coffee, taking a half hour with it; truth be told, he was loitering, checking out the coeds in their summer dresses—and a fine, sturdy bunch they were, in his opinion.

  At nine forty-five, he dumped the truck in a downtown Minneapolis parking structure and walked through the warm morning to the offices of DC&H, Jared Miles’s law firm.

  He was five minutes early for the appointment. The receptionist asked him if he wanted a cup of coffee or tea, but he declined, and the receptionist said, “I saw Cage the Elephant last year . . . in London.”

  “Must have been great.”

  “It was great . . . And we saw a bunch of shows. I’d like to go back, but it’s so expensive. British hotels.”

  And so on until her phone beeped and she picked it up, listened for three seconds, put it down, and said, “They’re ready for you.”

  * * *

  —

  She led the way to a conference room. Nancy Quill sat on the far side of a dark wooden table from the door, while Jared Miles sat at the end of the table, looking at a pad of yellow legal paper with a few notes scrawled on it.

  He stood when Virgil stepped in; he was on the short side, and slightly balding, his remaining light brown hair showing touches of gray. He was about fifty, Virgil thought, and well dressed in a navy blue suit, white shirt, and maroon tie. He smiled as they shook hands. “I’ve read a couple of your fishing stories in Gray’s. And the funny one about equipment. You should quit being a cop and write full-time.”

  “I’ve thought about it,” Virgil said. He liked the guy already. “The gear story . . . I mean, a nine-thousand-dollar fly rod? For what?”

  “You don’t want to insult the trout,” Miles said, laughing. He added, “Sit down. I think we can be done with this in five minutes.”

  Quill hadn’t said anything. When Virgil said, “Morning, Nancy,” she nodded, then looked at Miles.

  Miles huffed once, shuffled the legal pad, and said, “Nancy may have, hmm, been misunderstood when she was interviewed by Officer Trane. She didn’t flatly deny that her late husband was on the recording; she was uncertain about the voices.”

  Virgil could feel the story coming, and he said, “Okay.”

  Miles continued. “You see, the situation is, she didn’t want to be on the record saying that the voice she heard was her late husband. If she agreed that it was, without the advice of counsel, that could have ramifications further downstream.”

  Virgil looked at Quill, and asked, “Like what?”

  Quill looked at Miles, then said, “I am not especially affluent. When Barth and I began discussing divorce, he held our prenuptial agreement over my head and essentially told me I would get nothing from him if I insisted on taking it to court. Rather than go through a public divorce, he wanted a private settlement—a small one.”

  “A very small one,” Miles said. “One might say miserly. Cheese-paring, even. Tight-assed.”

  “I pushed back, but I didn’t have much to push with, given the prenuptial agreement,” Quill said. “Then he was killed and that changed everything. Frankly, I began to think of myself as wealthy.”

  “Or at least rich,” Miles chipped in. “The will hasn’t been thoroughly worked through as of yet, but Nancy appears to be in line for something approaching fifteen million dollars, and possibly more, depending on some real estate valuations.”

  “I also knew I was a suspect in the murder,” Quill said. “Margaret Trane made that abundantly clear. When she played the recording for me, two things immediately popped into my head. First, that she might think that I was the one who sent the recording to Barth, as leverage in the divorce.”

  “She didn’t do that,” Miles said. “She’d never heard, or heard of, the recording before Trane played it for her.”

  Quill continued. “Second, if this recording referred to an actual event, and if that actual event took place—an unethical operation with a poor or even bad result—the whole estate could be in jeopardy and might not be settled for years and years. If the patient’s family sued the estate . . . You see what I mean.”

  “I do,” Virgil said. “All of this occurred to you in a few seconds that Officer Trane was interviewing you?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “If Officer Trane were here, I would tell her I absolutely did not lie to her, although I might have been somewhat equivocal in my answers to her questions. I did not kill my husband. I have no idea who did it or why. I was astounded when I heard, and even more astonished when I learned of the circumstances: beaten to death in the library. I mean, if he’d been walking down the street and somebody had tried to rob him or something, that can happen to anyone. B
ut these circumstances . . .”

  They all sat and looked at one another for a few seconds.

  Virgil believed her. It was exactly the kind of unhelpful outcome he’d feared: a dead end.

  He continued to stare at Quill for a couple of beats, then asked, “You told Margaret that you’re not involved in a personal relationship at this time—or any time—since you and Mr. Quill started talking divorce.”

  Quill’s eyes flicked toward Miles and then back, the round-trip taking only a microsecond. “That’s correct. I was quite clear with her. I understood what she was asking—whether a friend might have killed Barth, hoping to benefit himself. There was no one.”

  Virgil asked about the other voices on the recording, but those, she said, she absolutely did not recognize.

  “It’s obvious where they come from, though—they must be other doctors. Barth only worked out of the university hospitals, so it must be somebody over there. If it actually was Barth, I’m still not sure of that. I’m not equivocating, I’m just not positive. There’s something not right about the recording.”

  “What’s not right?” Virgil asked.

  “All those voices. They all sound different, but then they all sound the same.” After a bit more thought, she added, “Of course, they’re all doctors, all working in the same place. Maybe it’s a cultural similarity.”

  After a few more unproductive questions, Virgil was stuck. Miles said, “Are we done?”

  “At least for the time being,” Virgil said.

  “All of this will be held in strictest confidence?”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Virgil said. “I’ll talk to Margaret, who’s leading the investigation. We will have to see if we can find the other people on the recording. What happens then?” He shrugged.