Bloody Genius

by John Sandford

  Hardy said to Cohen, “Maybe you should cut him loose. Just to be kind.”

  Cohen nodded, went down to the bedroom, and came back three minutes later. “I need to talk to my attorney privately,” she said to Virgil.

  “We’ll wait in the hallway,” Virgil said. To Hardy: “If she drops out the window, you go to jail. For a long time.”

  Hardy, exasperated: “She’s not going anywhere, Virgil. Jesus. Give us twenty minutes. We’ll get this all straightened out, and then we can all go home and go to bed.”

  “She’s already admitted to two of us that she was there,” Virgil said. “Keep that in mind when you try to find a way to weasel out of this.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil, Capslock, and Trane stood in the hallway for ten minutes, then, by mutual consent, sat in the hallway with their backs against the wall opposite Cohen’s door. Virgil told Trane how they’d gotten to Cohen’s place, beginning with the Paisley interview. A woman carrying a pizza went by, asked, “Are you locked out?” and they all said, “No,” as one, and the woman said, “Whatever,” and went down the hall with her pizza.

  “Smelled like pepperoni,” Capslock said, looking after her. “I could use a slice.”

  Five more minutes, and the fat man stepped through the door. He was wearing a blue-striped seersucker suit and a red tie. Trane said, “We need to talk.”

  “Completely voluntary,” the man said. “A once-in-a-lifetime experiment. Can I catch a break here?”

  “Let’s go down the hall where we can talk privately away from these two,” Trane said to him. “They’re not sensitive to this kind of adult behavior.”

  She led him away, turning only to say, “Call me when they’re done in there.”

  * * *

  —

  When they were out of earshot, Virgil said, “Tell you what, Del. Trane is sort of freaking me out here. That guy—”

  “She’s fuckin’ with you, Virgil,” Capslock said. “I know her. This is what her sense of humor runs like. She’s laughin’ up her sleeve.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.” He laughed. “She’s fuckin’ with you the same way you fuck with Davenport. About his daughter.”

  * * *

  —

  A few minutes later, Cohen’s apartment door popped open and Hardy stuck his head out. “Come on in.”

  Virgil called down the hall to Trane, who was still lecturing the man in the suit. She tapped him twice on the chest and then walked toward them, and Virgil and Capslock went to meet her, where Hardy couldn’t hear them.

  “Got his details,” she said. “I’ll look him up when we finish here. He admits he paid for the service. I told him that if Cohen wants to take it to trial, he might be called as a witness. But I also told him that I doubt she’ll do that.”

  “He got a family?” Virgil asked.

  “Divorced. He’s a schmuck. But he agreed to appear if we need him. I’m going to bust Cohen on the prostitution charge so I can get her in an interview room and on a video.”

  * * *

  —

  Inside Cohen’s apartment, they got chairs from the kitchen so everybody would have a place to sit, and Hardy said, “My client is happy to cooperate if we get some consideration on potential charges. She’s willing to concede that she was with Professor Quill in the library when he was murdered but didn’t know he’d been murdered. She doesn’t watch local television news and doesn’t read newspapers. When she heard the sounds of a struggle, she got frightened and ran away. She never saw the other person that Quill was struggling with.”

  The cops digested that for a moment, then Virgil said, “That’s not much of a concession, Lare, since she already told Del and me that she was there. If she wants consideration, we’ll need more than that.”

  Hardy cleared his throat. “Unfortunately—and I mean it, this is unfortunate—she didn’t see anything. She can give you her history with Quill, but she can’t help with the library situation. She’s willing to make a formal statement about that.”

  “That’s it?” Trane asked.

  Hardy said, “Unfortunately, that’s what we’ve got.”

  Trane said to Cohen, “I’m arresting you on a charge of prostitution. I’ll drop you off at the jail, and we’ll all meet down at my office tomorrow to figure out what to do. Is ten o’clock good for everybody?”

  Hardy said, “Come on, Sergeant Trane. Arresting her won’t do anything but piss everybody off.”

  Trane said, “I don’t care if she’s pissed off. I won’t risk losing her.”

  Hardy: “You bust her on prostitution, we make bail, we don’t cooperate. With anything.”

  Trane: “Then we will add a few charges, and some of those might take her down to Shakopee.”

  Cohen: “What’s Shakopee?”

  Virgil: “The women’s prison. It’s not nearly as unpleasant as you might think.”

  Cohen, wailing: “Larry . . .”

  Hardy to Trane: “Okay, be a hard-ass. Ten o’clock tomorrow.”

  Trane to Cohen: “On your feet.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Virgil should have woken the next morning with a feeling of accomplishment and well-being, but he didn’t. Instead, he thought of Cohen sitting in jail overnight and the extortion that Trane was about to drop on her. All of it was part of a game that both sides played: we bust you for prostitution, but we’re willing to let it go if you cooperate on something else.

  He’d done it himself, but arrests for prostitution, where the woman was selling her services rather than having a pimp selling them for her and taking the big cut, had always seemed pointless. They weren’t going to stop it. From a cop’s perspective, the biggest problem with prostitution was the spin-off to other crime—drugs, blackmail, assault. And if a pimp were involved, sometimes the violence used to keep the women in line.

  In a way it was like weed, he thought while he shaved. Weed was everywhere, and arresting people on charges that would be dropped or result in no jail time, even with a guilty plea, were pointless and a waste of police time and a lot of money.

  A lot of money. On the other hand, weed was implicated in touching off schizophrenia in teenagers. One look at the weed-smoking, mental homeless problem would suggest exactly how not good it was.

  He patted some bay rum aftershave on his face, smiled at himself, dragged his fingers through his hair, and went to get dressed. He selected a Larkin Poe shirt he’d been wearing a lot and that had developed a nice vintage look to it from being hung in the sun on an actual clothesline.

  Cohen would be a dead end, he thought while pulling on his boots. She hadn’t said much the night before, but she had said that she’d never seen the person who attacked Quill. The best that could be hoped for was that she’d solidly pinpoint the time of death, which might affect some alibis.

  Trane would take care of all of that.

  The question was, what would he take care of? He hadn’t been able to find doctors involved in a conspiracy with Quill or even find anybody who believed that the cabal existed. Nobody believed in China White, though Quill’s desk had held a squib of cocaine. The theft of the maps didn’t relate to Quill.

  Something was going on with the attack on Foster. He would think about that, but Foster wasn’t any help. And there didn’t seem to be any useful witnesses or entryways into the case. The St. Paul cops had come up dry.

  There was also the matter of a malpractice suit against Quill and other doctors on Quill’s team. After giving it some thought, he decided to check the lawsuit.

  He called Trane to tell her that. “Listen, about that cocaine in Quill’s desk: push Cohen on that, find out if she ever went to Quill’s house. Maybe she’s China White.”

  “I’ll do that,” Trane said. “I can only give it a couple of hours. I’m supp
osed to be at the courtroom at noon. I’m the first witness after the lunch break, and they want to do some last-minute prep before I go on.”

  “Good luck,” Virgil said.

  * * *

  —

  Trane had mentioned that she’d gotten a copy of the malpractice lawsuit from the attorneys who were on a retainer with the university. He checked his notes, got an address in downtown St. Paul, made a call, was told they’d make a copy of the document for him, and he drove over. The offices of John Brennan, LLC, were in a remodeled firehouse, and they had done a good job, Virgil thought, as he stepped through the palm forest on the first floor. A plaque on the wall listed seven attorneys as partners of the firm, and eight more associates, in addition to Brennan himself—a bigger organization than Virgil had expected.

  A receptionist gave him a copy of the lawsuit in a yellow legal envelope, and said, “Mr. Brennan would like to speak to you for a moment.”

  “Sure. How soon? I could run across the street and get a Diet Coke if he’s busy right now.”

  “He should be only a minute,” the receptionist said. She made a call, and said, “Follow me.”

  Brennan’s office was on the second floor. Virgil stepped out of the elevator into what would probably have been the firefighters’ sleeping quarters when the house was active, with polished pine plank floors and exposed pine beams bigger around than Virgil’s torso. Brennan used a rosewood table rather than a desk and had a row of matching rosewood file cabinets behind the table to hold whatever papers needed to be held. An oversized picture on a side wall showed a man in a University of Minnesota football uniform cradling a football to his gut and pretending to stiff-arm the photographer who took the picture.

  “That was me in younger days,” Brennan said.

  Brennan stood behind the table, fussing with papers. He was a large man, with white hair, a fleshy nose and fleshy ears, and querulous green eyes that matched the green of his necktie. A white shirt and gray suit completed his ensemble. His face was finely hatched with burst capillaries, which could be a sign of too much golf, too much drink, or both.

  As Virgil walked away from the elevator, Brennan came out from behind the table to shake hands, and asked, “Is Sergeant Trane still working this case?”

  “Yes, but she’s in court today,” Virgil said. Brennan pointed at a chair, and Virgil took it. The receptionist came back unasked with a can of frosty-cold Diet Coke, a glass full of ice, and a napkin to protect the desk. Virgil thanked her, said, “I don’t need the glass,” and she took it and went away.

  When she’d closed the door, Brennan said, “Sergeant Trane had concluded that our case didn’t have much to do with the murder of Barth Quill.”

  “She’s probably right,” Virgil said. “I’m running out of leads and thought I should take a look. We’ve had a couple of minor breaks in the past couple of days, and maybe something in the suit will, mmm, mesh with those.”

  “I see . . . You haven’t read the actual suit, though?”

  “No, I read Margaret’s summary of it. A short summary.”

  “All right. Let me give you a little more. It’s basically a nuisance suit, and if we settle—and we just might—the biggest benefactor is going to be a sleazy fellow member of the bar named Robin Jones. He’s an associate with the Larry Hardy firm over in Minneapolis. You know, ‘Call Me Lare,’ the billboards?”

  “Wait a minute! Hardy’s involved in this?”

  Brennan’s heavy white eyebrows arched. “Shouldn’t he be?”

  “I talked to him last night,” Virgil said. “We—Sergeant Trane and I—arrested one of his clients on prostitution charges. She’s directly connected to the Quill murder. A witness. We talked to them for half an hour, and Hardy never said a thing about this lawsuit.”

  Brennan leaned back in his chair, and said, “That is extremely interesting. Extremely. The suit was filed against the university and not Dr. Quill directly, but I’ve had some rumblings from Jones about amending the suit to go after Quill’s estate. Which I understand is quite large.”

  “It is,” Virgil said. “Many millions.” He drew his hand down over his eyes, thinking, and finally added, “It’s interesting, but I don’t see how it would tie to the murder.”

  Brennan: “The plaintiff, in the original suit, made a series of statements about assurances she got from Quill before she and her husband agreed to the operation that led, indirectly, to her husband’s death. With Quill dead, he’s not available to counter those claims. Which is why I suspect that Jones is talking about amending the suit. It wasn’t likely to be especially successful against the university, which also indemnified Dr. Quill on charges of malpractice. But now if the plaintiff should claim that Quill personally made fraudulent promises about the success of the operation, then they might be able to split the estate away from the university. A successful suit against Quill’s estate could be lucrative.”

  “I don’t know enough about the suit . . .”

  “Then here it is in a nutshell,” Brennan said, making a steeple with his fingers. “Carl McDonald was quadriplegic. He’d been an electrician with a company called The Brothers Electric. One day he fell off a ladder, landed on the back of his head, and pinched off the spinal cord at the neck. He still had some mobility in his left arm, hand, and fingers, but little control. And that was all he had. Quill agreed to take him as a patient, and after some time an operation was done by a team of surgeons under Quill’s direction.”

  “I understand that Quill doesn’t operate himself,” Virgil said.

  “That’s correct. Anyway, after the operation, McDonald did in fact recover further use of his left arm, hand, and fingers. He went through a period of physical therapy in an effort to maximize the use of all three. He also used pills, administered by his wife, to control pain in his neck, as well as elsewhere—new pain, his wife says, the result of the operation. When he got home, after the main round of physical therapy, his wife left the pain pills on a bedside table, and, while she was out shopping for groceries, McDonald managed to get ahold of the bottle and remove the lid with his teeth. He swallowed all the pills and was dead by the time his wife got back.”

  Virgil stared for a minute. “He committed suicide? And Quill’s team is being sued for malpractice?”

  “Yes. McDonald’s wife claims the operation was a failure and even created new pain—that’s the malpractice part—and that Quill and his team should have known that McDonald would require extensive psychological counseling in the wake of the failure. She claims that Quill told them that McDonald would make a substantial recovery. When I asked him, Quill denied saying that, and his team backs him up: they say he never said such a thing.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is, we have a bereaved wife suing a big, rich university and a big, rich doctor, and the decision will be made by a jury that—”

  “Isn’t big and rich. Got it,” Virgil said. “You haven’t said so, but the wife, and Hardy’s firm, may stand to benefit from Quill’s murder.”

  “I probably wouldn’t actually say that out loud myself,” Brennan said with a grin. “But if somebody else suggested that, I wouldn’t object.”

  “I gotta talk to Margaret,” Virgil said, looking at his watch, “right now. We don’t want to make any deals with Hardy’s client. Not yet.”

  “Feel free,” Brennan said. He pointed to a door in the side wall. “If you would like some privacy, that goes into my personal bathroom.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil stepped into the bathroom—a wood-lined cubicle that included a steam shower—wondered, in a brief fit of paranoia, if the room was bugged, and called Trane. She was in an interview room with Cohen and Hardy and stepped out to take his call. Virgil told her about his conversation with Brennan, that Hardy might benefit, possibly in a significant way, from Quill’s murder. />
  “What are you telling me? You think Cohen might have done it?”

  “I doubt that, but she could have told somebody about hooking up with Quill at midnight in the library,” Virgil said. “I was told Nancy Quill could get fifteen million from the estate. Even if they peeled off only two or three, it’d certainly be worth doing.”

  “No kidding . . . Oh, God, I got no time. I gotta be in court. I gotta call off this negotiation and send Cohen back to jail. I gotta make sure we hold her for the full forty-eight before the bond hearing. I gotta lot of shit to do.”

  “You do that. And I’ll go talk to McDonald’s wife about the lawsuit.”

  “Stay in touch, Virgil. We’re moving.”

  * * *

  —

  The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office was located in another fundamentally unimaginative, dirt-colored, ugly building in downtown Minneapolis, which didn’t bother Virgil because he didn’t have to look at it very often. He’d spoken to an assistant medical examiner on the ten-mile trip to Minneapolis from St. Paul, and the AME had promised to have the residue of the suicide ready to view.

  The AME’s name was Julia Parker, and she met him in her modest cubicle, dumped an evidence box on the desk. The evidence included an amber pill bottle that had once contained thirty oxycodones; the bottle’s white plastic cap, which was well chewed; photos of the deathbed and the deceased in it; and autopsy photos. Parker hadn’t done the autopsy itself, which had been done by another AME who was now on a fishing trip in the Boundary Waters. “He told us if we had to reach him, we couldn’t.”

  “How dead was he?” Virgil asked. “McDonald.”

  “Completely,” Parker said with a hint of a smile. “The prescription had just been refilled, and they still had a few pills from the previous one. Mrs. McDonald said she’d consolidated them in the single bottle. As a matter of neatness, I guess.”