Bloody Genius

by John Sandford

  “Oh, God, it’s going to get out,” Quill said to Miles.

  “Not if the police handle it with even a little bit of restraint,” Miles said. He smiled at Virgil. “I’m sure they will—for legal reasons, if nothing else.”

  Virgil smiled back. There was a threat in that comment, but it was nicely put. “Of course we will,” he said.

  “Something else,” Miles said. “I can’t tell you how to do your job, but isn’t it obvious that the attack on Dr. Quill had nothing to do with this recording?”

  “Explain how it’s obvious,” Virgil said.

  Miles threw his hands up. “Think about it. Officer Trane described to Nancy what Dr. Quill was doing the night before he was killed. Apparently, he drove over to a commercial neighborhood and left his car and then wandered around aimlessly, going to the library maybe once, maybe twice. If these people who were talking to him on the recording actually agreed to this unethical operation—they must have been doctors—why would they link up with Dr. Quill at the library in the middle of the night? Why not in one of their offices during the day? Why not at one of their homes, if they wanted more privacy? I don’t see it, Virgil. What happened in the library happened because of something Dr. Quill was doing in the library. Not because of something that happened in a surgical suite. If it happened at all.”

  “You have a point,” Virgil said. “But doesn’t it still come back to his professional life? Maybe there was something on that computer that would have caused somebody a large problem. Maybe that person knew about the computer, went there to steal it, and was surprised by Dr. Quill. What could it be? Could it be related to the recording? We know the recording was actually in Dr. Quill’s CD player, so he must have been listening to it recently.”

  “That’s a pretty thin connection,” Miles said.

  “No, it’s not thin. The CD one day, the murder the next. There must be a connection. If I could figure out what it is, I could catch the killer.”

  Miles shook his head. “Good luck with that. I still don’t see it.”

  * * *

  —

  When Virgil left Miles’s office, he called Trane, who didn’t answer the phone. Could be in court, Virgil thought. Disturbed by what Miles said, he decided to attempt to track down the other people on the recording. The best shot, he figured, was Carl Anderson, Quill’s lab director. He called ahead to make sure Anderson was in the office. He was, and he said he would be there for a while. Virgil drove back across the river and went up to the lab.

  Anderson was waiting, offered Virgil a cup of coffee, which Virgil declined, and they went back to his office, and Virgil shut the door. “I want to play a recording for you. I would have played it before, but I didn’t. Anyway, listen to this.”

  Virgil played the recording, and Anderson frowned. “That’s appalling. And it sounds like Barth.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “Well, it sounds like Barth, but, no, I’m not sure.”

  “His wife thinks it’s probably him,” Virgil said. “Another member of the lab staff is sure it is.”

  “Okay, it probably is,” Anderson said, frowning, bewildered. “Who are the other people?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you,” Virgil said.

  “I have no idea. I know all the people who are closely involved with Barth’s work and I didn’t recognize any of their voices. You could ask some of them. The way they were talking, they must have been close to Barth.”

  “Give me some names.”

  Anderson said, “These guys would be over at university hospitals . . . Let me see, I’ll give you four guys . . . No, five guys . . .” He wrote the names on a scratch pad, checked a computer contact list, added their cell phone numbers, and pushed the paper across the desk to Virgil.

  “You don’t think these guys were the ones talking to Dr. Quill?” Virgil asked.

  “No. But maybe they’d have some ideas who they might be. If they’re real.”

  “If they’re real? They sound pretty real to me.”

  Anderson shook his head. “Listen, Virgil, I need to explain something to you. Okay? Listen carefully.”

  “I’m listening carefully,” Virgil said.

  Anderson leaned back in his desk chair, looked briefly at the ceiling as he gathered his thoughts. “What we do here uses multiple disciplines—chemistry, biology, mechanical engineering, brain science, surgery—and we pull in all kinds of scientists and doctors. What that recording refers to, apparently, was a proposed unethical operation on somebody suffering from a spinal injury. That’s not something you pull out of your butt. That’s not something you can hide. When we do an op, there are usually a couple of dozen people directly involved, everybody from scientists and surgeons to accountants. The surgical team alone would probably have a lead surgeon plus one or two assistant surgeons. Even the assistants would be big shots on their own. Barth would be in the room probably with one of our techs, or even two. There might be residents coming and going, and for sure several nurses, surgical techs, anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists, imaging people, radiologists, and maybe some specialists in other fields—engineering, for instance. There’s no Weird Science stuff going on, surgeries in the middle of the night by a couple of guys using lightning bolts for power. If a little cabal of doctors tried to pull off an unethical operation in Barth’s field, they’d be immediately ratted out and challenged and hanged by their nuts the next day.”

  “Then what the hell is happening there?” Virgil demanded.

  “I don’t know. That sounded like Barth on the recording, but I don’t know. I mean, it’s like movie dialogue where they have to make things simple. The reality isn’t simple. In Barth’s field, it takes weeks or months to get an op together. Hours of talk and work. Whole seminars. It’s all very public.”

  Virgil: “What if they had a guy they hadn’t started on yet, all very preliminary, even before the guy was in your system? Quill knew he couldn’t get past these other people without talking to them. I mean, they hadn’t even talked to the human experimentation committee—or whatever it’s called—yet.”

  Anderson chewed on his lip for a few seconds, then looked up. “Yeah. It could work that way. In fact, that’s about the only way it makes sense.”

  * * *

  —

  Down in his truck again, Virgil sat and rubbed his eyes, then got on the phone to Trane.

  “Where are you?”

  “Courthouse,” Trane said. “Might not be able to talk. They could call me this morning. On the other hand, they might not. There’re rumors that the defendant’s attorneys might make a bunch of motions about evidentiary custody this afternoon.”

  “I talked to Anderson, Quill’s lab manager.”

  “What’d he say?”

  Virgil told her about the conversation and Anderson’s conclusion. “He thinks it’s possible that this was a preliminary, very secret talk, so it’s possible. Barely possible. He thinks it was Quill on the recording, but he’s not absolutely sure.”

  Silence. Then, “You need to jack up some doctors.”

  “I got a list of names from Anderson, people who worked with Quill. He thinks that if the recording is real, some of them might be able to tell us who the other voices belong to. He doesn’t think they belong to any of them.”

  “We need to jump all over that, get those guys on the list, see what they think. We need to follow through. Nancy now says it was Quill?”

  “Sorta. But she’s like Anderson: she says she can’t swear to it,” Virgil said. “She thinks the people on the tape sound odd. She might have a point.”

  “Listen, you’ve got that list of doctors. There’s a decent chance that those guys know the people on the recording. And maybe even the killer,” Trane said. “Why in the hell am I sitting here on my ass? I need to be out there. You, go jack up those doctors.”


  * * *

  —

  Because it was summer and the new semester was barely underway, two of the five doctors were out of town at their northern Minnesota fishing cabins. The other three, though, were in town, just scattered around. Because he wanted to talk to them face-to-face, it took Virgil the rest of the day to track them down.

  Robert Harris, a microsurgeon and the last of the three that Virgil interviewed, said the same things the other two did. “I don’t know those voices, I really don’t. Not except for Barth’s, of course—if that is Barth. Must have been a long time ago or very recent, nothing in the middle. We’ve got a solid team, and have had for five or six years now. Nobody wants to leave. We get our names in the journals, we make the big bucks. Barth could be a prick, but he was our prick. And, frankly, pricks are not unknown among the surgical fraternity. Not only can we handle it, it’s a fact of life.”

  “If it’s recent—and I have to think it’s recent—he was listening to the recording shortly before he was killed,” Virgil said.

  “How shortly?”

  “We don’t know,” Virgil conceded. “Anyway, is it possible that he was putting together another team that might not be so reluctant to go for the Hail Mary operation? The rest of you guys—the current team—could push back, right? What if he had a bunch of, say, younger, more obscure guys?”

  “Nope. Agent Flowers, this is not work you’d do with a bunch of residents,” Harris said. “I spent four years in med school and then eight years doing plastic and microsurgery residencies before I felt I could lead a complicated operation. Even then, I had to be careful. I mean, I was thirty-seven or thirty-eight before I felt I was hitting it out of the park. He wouldn’t do something like nerve splicing with a pickup team.”

  “You’re sure about that.”

  “I am. Listen, Flowers. Barth was a concepts guy, an intellectual. The way the thinking goes in medicine, you’ve got your really, really smart guys like Barth who think up all kinds of things, who know all kinds of stuff, but can’t do anything. They’re lab people. Chin-scratchers. Thumb-suckers. Then you’ve got surgeons, who are looked on as the dumb guys in the profession but dumb guys who’ll try just about anything. ‘We wanna cut. We like it. Get in there and fix it. If the patient dies, we did our best.’ If anything, that recording is backwards: Barth was the conservative guy. The ‘Let’s do it’ guys would be the surgeons. If that’s who he was talking to.”

  “Damnit,” Virgil said.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  Virgil called Trane and told her what he’d found.

  “Virgil, this recording is tied into the murder. I don’t care what these doctors are telling you. It’s tied.”

  “Figure it out tomorrow. Where are you on the trial?”

  “I’ll be going on the stand tomorrow afternoon. The judge is going to make a bunch of rulings in the morning, but he’s told the jury they have to be back at one o’clock.”

  “There won’t be something weird, like a mistrial? And you’ll have to do it all over?”

  “No, no. The lead defense attorney is, like, about fourteen. I think he got out of law school on Monday morning, and he’s filed so many motions that they contradict each other. I think it’s possible that he’s looking to wear down the prosecution and get a deal. Because his motherfucker is a guilty motherfucker.”

  “All right. I may stop by tomorrow to watch you do your act. Maybe we can have a séance after you’re done.”

  “Talk to ya.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil was headed back to the hotel when Del Capslock, the BCA agent, called. “You free?”

  “Yup. As the breeze.”

  “Meet me over at the Territorial,” Capslock said. “I’m there now, back by the foosball table.”

  “The sun’s not down yet.”

  “Fuck the sun. The place opened at six. Don’t see any sun in here.”

  Virgil got directions; the bar was ten minutes away. He found a spot on the street, walked a half block to the theater-type marquee that said “Drinks.” And, under that, “Ladies Nite E ery Nite.” Virgil spent the next few seconds of his life wondering if the “v” had fallen off, been stolen for some reason, or was simply a scarce letter that the bar hadn’t happened to have on hand.

  Calling the bar shabby was an insult to the word. Some dive bars had peanut shells on the floor; the Territorial made do with ordinary dirt, apparently ground in over several decades of near failure. Virgil made his way past the long, shabby bar, and its equally shabby bartender, to the broken foosball machine, and Capslock, who was sitting in a booth and facing a thin, shabby criminal whose narrow face was framed by brown, greasy hair pulled back in a pigtail.

  Virgil flicked his fingers at Capslock, gesturing him to move over—he wasn’t going to sit next to Pigtail—and Capslock slid over, and asked, “You want a beer?”

  “No, I’m on duty.”

  Capslock laughed, finished his PBR, and waved at the bartender. “Hey, Rick, two more.”

  He turned back to Virgil, and said, “This is Long Wayne Gibbs, aka Long Doyle Gill, aka Long Bob Greer. Part of him used to make pornos.”

  Virgil said to the criminal, “Should I just call you Long for short?”

  “Call him Wayne. That might be his real name,” Capslock said.

  Reacting to Virgil’s “Long/short” comment, Wayne was giving him his version of the prison death stare, which was interrupted by the arrival of two more PBRs. When the bartender had gone, Capslock said, “Wayne, tell Virgil about China White.”

  “There isn’t one,” Wayne grunted.

  Capslock said to Virgil, “There you go . . .”

  “You mean, no one anywhere?” Virgil asked.

  “Maybe in California—I wouldn’t know about that—but not in Minneapolis or St. Paul. Nobody would call themselves that. It’s too stupid.”

  “I’m not sure how many bright drug dealers I’ve known,” Virgil said. “I could probably count them on the fingers of one finger.”

  “Still too stupid,” Wayne said. “Even a dumb guy wouldn’t call himself that.”

  “Or woman.”

  That caused Wayne to pause halfway through a swallow of beer, his Adam’s apple stuck briefly under his chin. When he took the bottle down, he said, “You know, China White would be a good name for a porn star. One of them chink half-breeds, looks kinda white but with slanty eyes?”

  Virgil: “So, you know any porn stars named China White?”

  “Not yet,” Wayne said.

  Capslock: “Wayne’s getting out of the art side of porn, going into production work.”

  Wayne: “That’s where the money is.”

  Virgil said to Capslock, “Well, I appreciate meeting this gentleman. Now, I think I’ll head over to my hotel—”

  “Virgil, Virgil. Listen to the man,” Capslock said.

  “He said there’s no China White.”

  “But that’s not the only question you’re asking, is it? Wayne’s connections in the sex business are extensive . . . You tell him, Wayne.”

  Wayne leaned forward, dropped his voice: just us boys here. “I was, uh, auditioning this chick for a role in one of my upcoming productions, and we got to talking and she mentioned that this girl she knew was fucking a famous professor.”

  Virgil looked at him for a moment, then asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

  “As a favor to Del,” Wayne said.

  “Wayne was supplying medical marijuana to some needy people—”

  “Injured veterans,” Wayne said.

  “—and was found to have twenty kilos of primo Mexican weed in the back of his Camaro,” Capslock said.

  “The whole thing was a total misunderstanding,” Wayne said. “One of my friends put it there. I didn’t even know about it.” />
  “What happened to his friend?” Virgil asked Capslock.

  “He returned to his residence in Juárez. He refuses to come back and testify on Wayne’s behalf,” Capslock said. “A group of us law enforcement officers pointed out to the county attorney that Wayne has insights into several local criminal enterprises. An arrangement was made.”

  “I gotta do two thousand hours of community service,” Wayne said. “Two thousand hours. Jesus Christ and all the fuckin’ Apostles didn’t do that many.”

  “Careful,” Capslock said. “Virgil’s the son of a preacher.”

  “Well, then, I apologize to you, your dad, Jesus Christ, and all the fuckin’ Apostles—the whole fuckin’ bunch of you.”

  Virgil: “I’m losing track of the conversation. You have a friend who knows somebody who was fucking a famous professor?”

  “Yeah. At the U.”

  “What’s your friend’s name? Not China White?”

  “Paisley.”

  “Paisley what?”

  “Just Paisley. Some of the guys call her Paisley Tied because, you know . . .”

  “Yeah,” Virgil said. “Like a necktie.”

  Wayne glanced at Capslock, then looked back at Virgil. “Necktie? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Virgil said, “What?”

  Wayne said, “No neckties. She’s called that because you can tie her up. Or she can tie you up. Strictly voluntary. Costs extra, of course.”

  Capslock laughed, and asked the world, “We’re talking about a classy chick, are we not?”

  “Where can I find her?” Virgil asked. “Paisley?”

  “You gotta call her and she’ll meet you. I got her number. Tell her that she was recommended by Richard. Ask her what facilities she offers,” Wayne said. “That way, she’ll know you know about the tie thing.”

  “I’ll do that,” Virgil said. “And Wayne? If word leaks back to her before I get there, you’ll be doing six thousand hours.”