Bloody Genius

by John Sandford

  Wayne looked at Capslock. “This guy’s an asshole, Del. You said he was okay.”

  Capslock shrugged, and said, “Wayne, we can all be assholes. Isn’t that the way of the world? Assholes everywhere. You’re an asshole, I’m an asshole . . .”

  Wayne took a swig of beer, tipped the bottle at Virgil. “And this guy’s an asshole. You’re right, Del. Assholes everywhere. Six thousand hours, shit snackin’ crackers.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil thought to go somewhere with Capslock to make the call to Paisley, but Capslock said, “Why not now?”

  “You mean here?”

  “Yeah. Here. I mean, we’re already sitting down.”

  “Tell her you met Richard here, at the Territorial,” Wayne said.

  Virgil laid his phone faceup on the table so everybody in the booth could hear and he called. A man answered. “Who’s this?”

  Virgil: “Could I speak to, uh, Paisley?”

  “She ain’t here. Who are you?”

  “Bob.”

  “Why do you want Paisley, Bob?”

  “My friend Richard recommended that I take her out, you know, on a date.”

  “Richard, huh? Tall black dude with this bald spot?”

  Wayne was shaking a finger, and mouthed, Short . . . white . . .

  Virgil said, “Well, uh, this guy was a sort of short white guy. I met him down at the Territorial.”

  After a moment of silence, the man said, “Wait one. Paisley walked in.”

  A woman came on a minute later, and asked, “What’d Richard say about me?”

  “He said to ask what facilities you offer.”

  “Well, Bob, what exactly do you need?”

  “He said some people call you Paisley Tied. And, you know . . .”

  “Are you here in town, Bob?”

  “I’m from Mankato. I’m staying at the Graduate tonight.”

  “Huh. Nice place. Okay, it’s a date. I’ll meet you at the Applebee’s. How will I recognize you?”

  “I’m wearing an old Led Zeppelin T-shirt that just says ‘Zep’ and a sport coat, and I have blond hair down over my ears.”

  “Ooo, sounds handsome. Half hour from now?”

  “See you then,” Virgil said.

  * * *

  —

  Virgil and Capslock said good-bye to Wayne as they all walked out to the street, and just before they parted, Wayne said, “Del, for extra credit . . .”

  “Like what?”

  “If you could put me down for like a hundred hours picking up trash on St. Dennis Road?”

  “That’s a lot of trash,” Capslock said. “What do you have?”

  “A warning?”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  Wayne said to Virgil, “That guy you talked to? That’s Paisley’s brother. The word is, he flunked out of the Vikings offensive line for being too mean. I swear to God, the guy could pull the arms off a gorilla.”

  Virgil went with that. “Okay.”

  Wayne turned to Capslock and lifted his eyebrows.

  “I’ll think about it,” Capslock said.

  * * *

  —

  A half hour later, Virgil was in a booth at the Applebee’s, looking at a cheeseburger and a Diet Coke, and Capslock was across the room, talking to a waitress about her impending motherhood. Paisley walked in, but nobody turned to look. She was a nondescript, slender, dark-haired woman with a soft face, a mole under one eye, and dark eyebrows that nearly met in the middle. She was carrying an oversized leather purse. She was alone.

  She spotted Virgil, took in the Zep T-shirt, and slid into the booth across from him. She said, “Give me your hand, Bob,” and Virgil put his hand on the table. She gripped it, and said, “I can do about anything you want, but I don’t allow myself to get hurt. When we go outside, you’ll see my assistant. He’s the guy who looks like an old telephone booth. And, I promise you, he could yank off your head and shove it up your ass. That’s not a threat. I’m saying he’s my protection. Do you understand?”

  Virgil bobbed his head dumbly, and she went on with her price list. Virgil nodded in Capslock’s direction, who broke away from the waitress, walked over to the booth in four long strides, and slid in beside Paisley, trapping her and pushing her to the wall.

  Capslock smiled, and said, “I’m Del Capslock, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. This hippie gentleman is Virgil Flowers, also an agent with the BCA. We’re cops, but this is not necessarily a bust.”

  She looked from Virgil to Capslock, and then snarled, “If it’s not a bust, then what is it?”

  “A good-natured search for information,” Virgil said. “I taped your offers and your price list, so you’re out of luck, Paisley. But, I have very little interest in your moneymaking activities. I need to know something from you.”

  “What?”

  “The name of a friend of yours who was having a sexual relationship with a university professor. Don’t lie to us—we’re investigating a murder, and if you lie to us, you’ll be an accessory to murder. That’s a whole different thing than a prostitution arrest.”

  She didn’t argue but frowned at Virgil, and asked, “How’d you hear about my friend?”

  Virgil said, “There’s word going around on the street. It got back to us as a tip. A bad guy got a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

  Capslock was looking over Virgil’s shoulder, and said, quietly, “A very large personage just walked in.”

  Virgil said to Paisley, “If that’s your brother, wave him off.”

  “What happens if I don’t?” she asked.

  Capslock said, “Paisley, for Christ’s sakes, we’re cops. We’ve got guns. He starts on us, and I’ll shoot him three times in the fuckin’ heart and I won’t lose ten seconds of sleep over it. Wave him the fuck off.”

  Paisley raised her eyes, looked over Virgil’s shoulder, and shook her head no.

  “That was a wise move for all of us,” Capslock said, settling back into the booth. “Now, what’s your friend’s name?”

  “Lilith.”

  Virgil said, “Lilith? I mean, does she read the Bible or something?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” Capslock said. “Lilith. You have a number for her?”

  “Yes. We sometimes party together.” She looked at Virgil. “We would have partied with you, if you weren’t a fuckin’ cop. You missed the best sex of your life.”

  “I’ll live with it somehow,” Virgil said. “Gimme the number. And let me make a few threats before you go. If the lunch box, or the phone booth, or whatever the fuck he is, tries to molest us in the parking lot, we’ll shoot him. If he calls Lilith, you’ll both get free five-year housing courtesy of the state government. Like I said, this is a murder case.”

  She said, “Okay.”

  * * *

  —

  They got Lilith’s real name, which was Abigail Cohen, and which led Virgil to think that perhaps she did read the Bible, or at least had heard some Jewish folktales. They said good-bye to Paisley, who didn’t exactly trot out the door. Still sitting in the booth, still working on cheeseburgers, they ran Cohen’s name through the DMV and got her birth date and an address, and then through the NCIC database, which showed three arrests, but no convictions, two for soliciting and one for a small amount of marijuana.

  “Must have a good lawyer,” Capslock said.

  “Or the courts just don’t give a shit about sex and weed anymore,” Virgil said.

  “That could be,” Capslock said.

  Virgil called Jon Duncan, his nominal supervisor at the BCA, who called another agent, who got in touch with Verizon and AT&T. An AT&T billing address confirmed the driver’s license address, and since hookers relied on cell phones at least as much as dope dealers, it was pr
obably good. Virgil finished his third Diet Coke, then asked Capslock if he’d like to come along to Cohen’s address.

  “Why not? Might as well go fuck with a criminal in the dark. It’s been a while since I got shot.”

  * * *

  —

  Cohen lived in a newer apartment complex in Dinkytown, where Quill had been wandering the night he went missing. The building was done in clapboard and stone with rows of windows that, in the back, looked out over railroad tracks. Virgil thought it had been designed for the richer class of students. With lots of moving in and moving out, and people coming and going, it was ideal for a woman with frequent male visitors. The front door was locked, but a resident manager let them in, and asked, anxiously, “Is Abby in trouble? She seems so nice.”

  “No, she’s not,” Virgil said. “Not at all. We’re running down a list of people who knew a man who died, trying to find some relatives.”

  The manager might have been skeptical but shrugged, and said, “Up the stairs and to the left. Or up the elevator and to the right,” and walked away.

  * * *

  —

  At Cohen’s apartment, Capslock said, “Watch the master and learn.” He knocked rapidly, but not loudly, on the door, and said, in an anxious whisper, “Abby! Abby! Are you in there? Abby!”

  A moment later, a woman’s hushed voice: “Who is it?”

  “Abby! It’s me. Jesus Christ, Abby, we got to get out of here . . .”

  The door opened a crack—a chain showed across the gap—and a woman peered out, and Capslock showed his ID, and said, “Police. Open the door, Miz Cohen.”

  “Fuck that,” she said, and tried to slam the door, but Capslock had his steel-toed boot in the crack.

  Capslock said, “If you don’t open it, we kick it in. If you break one of my toes, I’ll charge you with aggravated assault on a police officer.”

  “I’m calling my lawyer,” Cohen said.

  “We’ll let you do that,” Virgil said.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “We need to know what you saw in the library the night Barth Quill got killed.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” she squealed. “I got scared and ran away.”

  Virgil tipped his head back, and said, aloud, ‘Thank you, God.”

  Capslock pushed on the door. “Open the door. You can call your attorney, but we want to make sure you don’t run away again.”

  Silence. Then: “You promise?”

  “I swear,” Capslock said. “We’ll sit on your couch, and you can call.”

  More silence, then she popped the chain, backed past a short hallway, which led to a compact kitchen, and into the living room. She was wearing a mid-thigh green satin dressing gown that showed off her slender legs, her best feature.

  Otherwise, Cohen, like Paisley, was an average-looking woman, long-faced, thin-lipped, a chiseled nose, with auburn hair tied back in a ponytail. Harder-edged than Paisley, as though she might work out on a daily basis. She did smell good, like vanilla.

  She backed up until she got to a couch, sat down, and attempted to tug down the hem of her gown. Virgil and Capslock took two easy chairs that faced the couch over a glass table. A second hallway led out of the living room deeper into the apartment but only showed three closed doors.

  “Call your attorney,” Virgil said. He got on his own phone and called Trane.

  * * *

  —

  Virgil: “Where are you?”

  “At home,” Trane said. “About to eat another pie.”

  “We found the woman who was in the library with Quill when he was killed.”

  “Holy cow! Uh, who’s ‘we’?”

  “Do you know Del Capslock?” Virgil asked.

  “Del? He’s there with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m coming. Give me the address.”

  Virgil gave her the address and Cohen’s name. “She’s calling her attorney. We could be a while.”

  “I’m running.”

  * * *

  —

  Cohen was on the phone to her attorney. “I don’t give a shit if you’re at dinner, I got a big problem here, Larry. I got two cops sitting in my living room like a couple of tombstones and they think they got something big on me.”

  Pause to listen.

  “I know she’ll be disappointed,” Cohen replied, “but think how disappointed she’ll be if the details of our relationship come out.”

  Pause.

  Then: “I don’t know. They think I was a witness to whoever killed that professor.”

  Pause.

  “Do you want me to answer that with them sitting here?”

  Pause.

  “Okay. You know where I’m at,” Cohen said.

  * * *

  —

  She hung up, and said, “He’ll be here in twenty minutes.”

  Capslock said, “I gotta pee. Where’s the bathroom?”

  Without thinking, Cohen said, “Down the hall.”

  Virgil quickly grabbed her attention. “Why can’t you tell us about Professor Quill right now? We know you had a relationship . . .”

  “I really gotta . . .” Capslock was moving down the hall, and when Cohen saw him pass the first door on the right, she called out, “Hey, not that one . . .”

  But Capslock had popped the farthest of the three doors, and now he stepped back, looked at Virgil, and said, “Oh my God. This is awful.”

  “Get out of there,” Cohen screamed.

  “I can’t just leave—the poor guy might be in desperate trouble here,” Capslock said. And, “Virgil, do you have a pocketknife? We have to free the victim.”

  “He’s not a victim,” Cohen shouted. “This is adult consensual sex.”

  Virgil walked down the hall, Cohen tagging anxiously behind him, and looked in the bedroom door: a large man—a fat man—pink in color, with fine skin resembling a baby’s, was on the bed, nude, gagged, trussed up like an Easter ham, ropes to all four corners of the bed to hold him in place with his ass up in the air. A box of battery-powered sex toys sat on the bed beside him.

  Virgil said, “Excuse me, Del, but I can’t look at this.”

  “I don’t want to, but we can’t let the guy die,” Capslock said. To the man on the bed he said, “If you’re okay, wiggle your fingers.”

  The man wiggled his fingers.

  “All right, then. We’ll leave the door open. You develop a problem, just yell.”

  “He’s gagged, Del,” Virgil said. “He can’t yell.”

  Capslock turned back to the man. “If you get in trouble, make some of those strangle sounds. We’ll hear you.”

  They all went back to the living room, and Cohen dropped onto the couch, her arms crossed over her chest, the classic female defensive position.

  “You gotta admit, that’s not something you see every day,” Capslock said to Virgil.

  “I had a case down in Trippton, a motorcycle guy hiring himself out to whip naked women. He had a pretty good client list,” Virgil said. “One of the women told me that it was therapeutic.”

  “It certainly can be,” Cohen snapped. “It probably helped her with all kinds of repressive neuroses, both known and unknown.”

  “I’m pretty sure it didn’t,” Virgil said.

  “Oh, you’re a shrink now?” she sneered.

  “No, but another guy shot her in the head. That was the end of her psychological problems. As far as we know.”

  They all stared at each other for a moment, and then Capslock said, “Well, that was a conversation killer.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil pecked away with questions about Quill, but Cohen kept her arms crossed and simply shook her head and sometimes grunted. Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock at the do
or. Virgil answered it, and Trane said, “Got here as fast as I could.” She looked at Cohen, and asked, “Is this the lady?”

  “This is her,” Virgil said. “We can’t beat her up because her attorney is coming, and there’s a witness down the hall in the bedroom. You might want to introduce yourself.”

  “Oh, fuck all of you,” Cohen said.

  Trane went down the hall, looked in the bedroom, showed no reaction at all, came back and sat down with a straight face, then looked at Virgil, and asked, “What?”

  Virgil shrugged, and said, “I dunno, I thought you’d . . . I dunno . . .”

  “Are you trying to tell me you’ve never done that?” Trane asked. To Cohen she said, “He’s so straight he gives me a headache.”

  “He’s an asshole,” Cohen said.

  Virgil: “That’s the second or third time I’ve been called that in the last hour. I’m tired of it.”

  “Then why don’t you leave?” Cohen said.

  “Because he’s a dedicated law enforcement officer,” Trane said. To Capslock: “How are your hips, Del?”

  “Still hurt when I get up in the morning, but Cheryl’s got me doing yoga stretches. That helps.”

  To Cohen, Trane said, “Del got shot by some old people down on the Mexican border. Almost got killed.”

  Cohen said, “Good.”

  * * *

  —

  Time dragged. A half hour after Cohen called, her attorney showed up, was introduced as Larry Hardy, also known as “Call me Lare” on his ubiquitous billboards.

  “I thought you did personal injury,” Trane said.

  “I do a little of everything,” Hardy said. “Gotta make the monthly nut.”

  “Speaking of nuts, you might want to take a look in that last bedroom down there,” Trane said.

  Cohen: “Fuck all of you. Again.”

  Hardy went to look, came back, and asked, “Is this a great country or what?” and then added, “Are you charging my client?”

  “She’s going to be charged with something,” Trane said. “She left the scene of a crime, for one thing. A murder. If Piggy down there chokes on his gag, we’ll probably add manslaughter.”