Bloody Genius

by John Sandford

  He called Booker, who picked up instantly. “Virgil. We’re meeting at ten.”

  “You sound a little wired,” Virgil said.

  “No, I’m a lot wired. I’m sitting here with my attorneys. We’re going to nail this asshole to the cross.”

  Virgil said, “I’m going to read you five names . . .”

  He did, and with the fourth Booker shouted, “Wait. Boardman? B-o-a-r-d-m-a-n?”

  “Boardman Chemicals.”

  “That’s the one, those fuckers,” Booker shouted. “They’re going down! They’re going down!”

  * * *

  —

  At nine o’clock, a young woman in a suit and carrying a briefcase turned up at the door. She represented Nash, she said. Trane gave her a copy of the search warrant, which the young woman said was illegally broad and not soundly based.

  Trane smiled at her, and said, “Your client was caught red-handed inside the Surface Research building at two-thirty this morning accessing confidential files and photographing them. He’s toast. If you would like to sit and watch the search, you’re welcome to. But we’re allowed to look anywhere there might be computer files hidden, and, as you know, they can be hidden on a thumb drive. We’re going to take the house down to the studs.”

  At nine-thirty, Jenkins went home to sleep. And as the search continued, Trane took Virgil aside and told him that nothing she’d found in her further research into Robin Jones suggested that he might have killed Quill. “That’s not going anywhere. I’d give you an in-depth explanation, if you want it, but it’s not going anywhere. He didn’t do it.”

  “Alibi?”

  “Yeah, he’s got an alibi, and a witness—a woman he’s seeing. She spent the night. She’s a law clerk, smart enough to know not to lie, at least for Jones’s sake.”

  “All right. Let’s keep him in mind, but . . . All right,” Virgil said. “I’m telling you, we haven’t seen one fuckin’ thing here that points at Quill or the university. We know Nash made some moves, and was even in the library, but I can’t find anything to back it up. No references to any medical companies, nothing on the tax returns.”

  “If he killed Quill, there’s a good chance that he’d have wiped away any evidence of it. Stopped what he was doing and walked away,” Trane said.

  “True. Probably have to take a deeper look at his client list, see who he might have been talking to, who’d be interested in stuff coming out of Quill’s lab.” Virgil looked at his watch. “I’ve got to run down to Dakota County for this meeting. I’ll see if I can get with Nash, see what he has to say for himself.”

  “He’s pretty lawyered up . . .”

  “He won’t deal anyway,” Virgil said. “Trying to get a break on Surface Research in exchange for taking the bullet for a murder? No way. I’ll talk to him, see if we can eliminate him. Or not. Not would be interesting.”

  * * *

  —

  The meeting with the prosecutors didn’t take long. Stuart Booker was treated with deference, but it stopped well short of actual slobbering. They knew who he was and who his friends were, but it wasn’t that huge a deal, just huge enough to ensure that both Boyd Nash and Allen Young were denied immediate bail on grounds that they might destroy evidence in the computer files.

  Virgil asked to interview Nash but Nash refused to budge, instead referring Virgil to his attorney, a man named George Wesley. Wesley, as it happened, had visited Nash in the fortress-like Dakota County Jail. He was on the way back to his office in the Twin Cities when Virgil called him with the interview request.

  “I won’t let him do it today, not until he’s out on bail and back at his house,” Wesley told Virgil. “If you want to submit written questions, I’ll consider them.”

  “There’s something going on here that you don’t know about. What if I came by your office for an off-the-record chat?”

  After a moment, Wesley, who was still in his car, said, “I could do that. You won’t get much from me, but I could do that.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil said good-bye to Booker and headed back north to Edina, where Wesley had his office in a neatly kept brick building that was full of law offices. A secretary emailed Wesley that Virgil was in the office; Wesley, who was apparently no more than twenty feet away through a couple of walls, came out and waved Virgil into his office.

  “I can’t imagine why we need this conference,” he said with a friendly smile as they shook hands, “since I’m not going to give you anything.”

  Virgil took a chair as Wesley, a thin, pale man with a shock of blond hair, sat behind his desk.

  “Here’s the thing. What your client was doing to Mr. Booker was rotten, and I don’t care about it. Or I do a little bit, enough to send Mr. Nash to prison for a while. What I care about is another case I’m working on, the murder of professor Barthelemy Quill at the University of Minnesota.”

  Wesley sat back. “Wait a minute. You’re saying that my client is a suspect in that case?”

  “That’s a little strong, but we know he made a couple of passes at Quill’s lab and some of Quill’s associates. Other physicians. We also know that he was actually in the Wilson Library, near Quill’s carrel, sometime in the weeks before Quill’s murder there. What we need to do is eliminate Nash as a suspect, if that can be done. If it can’t, then we’ll be considerably more interested in him.”

  Wesley thought about that for a moment, then said, “You want an alibi?”

  “If he’s got one. We’d look into it,” Virgil said. “Otherwise, we’ll start looking at him for the murder.”

  “Give me some details on the Quill case,” Wesley said. “I’ll talk to Boyd and get back to you. I’m not saying we’ll provide an alibi, but I’ll talk to him about whether we might be willing to cooperate at all.”

  “Fair enough,” Virgil said. “If you want to make a couple of notes . . . Dr. Quill was killed three Fridays ago, very likely around midnight on Friday . . .”

  * * *

  —

  After leaving Wesley’s office, Virgil was feeling wonky from a lack of sleep and food, so he stopped at McDonald’s for salt, grease, and carbohydrates, and then headed back to the hotel for a nap. He’d been in his room for five minutes when Wesley called back.

  “Mr. Nash said that you have all the evidence you need to clear him. That’s all he has to say.”

  “Huh. That could be taken in a couple of different ways.”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of the relevant one,” Wesley said.

  * * *

  —

  Virgil called Trane. “What’s happening with Nash’s computers?”

  “Don’t know. I can check.”

  He told her about Wesley’s statement, and said, “I think they’re sending us a signal without admitting to anything. I think they’re telling us that something in the files will indicate that Nash was down at Surface Research that Friday night. We’d been told he’d gone there several times, that he went on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights late, when nobody was working.”

  “We’re going to provide him with an alibi?”

  “I think that’s what they’re signaling,” Virgil said.

  “I’ll get with the techs. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go take a nap, then pack up my dirty clothes and head home. I’ll be back on Monday.”

  “Goddamnit, I feel like we’ve got all kinds of possibilities. But it’s, like, trying to squeeze Jell-O, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do. Let’s take a break and think about it.”

  * * *

  —

  They agreed to meet Monday morning in Trane’s office.

  Virgil shaved, showered, and dropped on the bed and was asleep in five minutes. He woke up groggy, looked at the clock: almost six. He was thinking about Fran
kie: he needed to call her. He was fishing around on the night stand for his phone when it rang. He picked it up and looked at the screen: no caller ID.

  He answered with “Virgil Flowers . . .”

  A woman screamed at him, “Brett’s dead! He’s dead. Right here.”

  After a moment of confusion, he thought: Megan Quill. Brett was the sleepy, bare-assed dude. “Easy,” Virgil said. “How do you know he’s dead?”

  “Because I’m looking at him,” Quill shouted into her phone. “And he’s dead.”

  “You’re looking . . . Did you call the cops?”

  “You’re a cop,” she said. “I got your card.”

  “Yeah, but . . . Where are you?”

  “In Brett’s room.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  He heard running footsteps, then heard her: “What’s the address? What’s the fuckin’ address here? Hey, you . . .”

  There was more shouting in the distance, and then she came back with a St. Paul address not far from the University of St. Thomas.

  “Stay where are, don’t touch a thing. And leave the room,” Virgil said. “I’ll call the St. Paul cops, they should be there in five minutes. I’ll be there in ten. Stay right there.”

  “It looks like he . . . I think he OD’d. There’s a syringe on the floor. He’s all white-and-gray-looking.”

  “What—”

  “Heroin. Sometimes he did heroin. He said it made him dreamy.” She started to sob.

  “Stay there,” Virgil repeated.

  “Jesus Christ, he’s really dead!” she screamed.

  Virgil again told her to leave the room, and she did, and he said, “Go someplace and sit down with your back against the wall. You don’t want to faint and hurt yourself. Don’t let anybody go in the room. Sit, and the cops will be there in a couple.”

  He clicked off, dialed 911, identified himself, explained the situation, gave the operator the address Megan Quill was calling from. “I’ll be there myself in a few minutes. Tell the responding guys that this could be part of another murder investigation and to be careful with the scene. Tell them to freeze it, nothing more, and call Ryan at St. Paul Homicide.”

  When he got off the call to 911, he called Trane. “Megan Quill found her friend dead about two minutes ago,” he said. “She thinks it might be an overdose. St. Paul cops are on the way. I’m going over.”

  “Give me an address. I’m sitting in my car at the office. I’ll be right behind you.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  As Virgil walked out of the elevator, he almost ran over Harry, who was headed for the bar.

  Harry said, “You finally get a clue? You look like it.”

  “Maybe,” Virgil said. “Can’t talk.”

  “It’s a kid, isn’t it?” Harry called after him, as he went out the door.

  A dead kid, Virgil thought, as he jogged out to his truck.

  * * *

  —

  From the University of Minnesota to St. Thomas normally would have been a ten-minute run, but Virgil had grille lights and a siren and he punched them up and made it in eight. He found two St. Paul cop cars at the curb outside an old, decrepit house.

  Virgil talked to the first cop he came to, who said another cop was on the second-floor landing of the house with Megan Quill. “We stuck our head inside the room to see if the victim could be resuscitated, but he appears to have been dead for a while.”

  “Okay, I’m going up,” Virgil said.

  The cop touched his arm. “We didn’t mess with the body, but we looked at it to make sure he was cold and not breathing. Check his stomach.”

  “What?”

  “Check his stomach.”

  As Virgil walked toward the house, another car pulled to the curb down the street and honked once. He turned and saw Trane getting out.

  Trane flashed her badge at the St. Paul cops and hurried up to Virgil.

  “Have you been inside?”

  “No. And the cops are being mysterious.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go up. I’ve been told to look at the dead kid’s stomach.”

  “What?”

  * * *

  —

  They went up to the second floor of the house, where the other cop was standing next to Quill, who was sitting on the hallway floor.

  Trane identified herself and Virgil to the second cop, said hello to Quill, who was stricken, red-faced and sporadically weeping, and the cop said, “We’ve got an investigator coming, he’ll be here in a couple of minutes.”

  “The victim . . .” Virgil began.

  “Has been dead for a while,” the cop said. “He’s on his back. We’re seeing some rigor in the eyelids, and the blood’s already settled in his back and legs. There was no hope of resuscitation.”

  Trane said, “Would you mind if we took the witness outside? We know her, we’ve dealt with her, it might be better . . . We’ll wait for your investigator by the front door.”

  The cop nodded. “Sure. She’s shook up.”

  Virgil: “We need to take a quick look at the victim. Your partner outside . . .”

  The cop nodded again. “Yeah. Take a look.”

  Quill said in a choked voice, “His name is Brett Renborne. Somebody’s got to call his parents.” And she began weeping again.

  “Hate this shit, when it’s a kid,” Trane said, as they walked down the hall to the room—it was a single room, perhaps fifteen by twenty feet, walls painted a medium blue, with a bed, an Apple laptop on a small wooden desk with the printer on the floor next to the desk, a shelf with a microwave on it, and there was a closet. But no bathroom. Virgil asked, and the cop at the door said, “Down the hall.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil led the way inside Renborne’s apartment, both he and Trane stepping carefully. Virgil pointed silently at the syringe on the floor.

  Renborne was sprawled on the bed, on top of a sheet, mostly on his right side, with his right arm extended out from beneath his body. He was wearing a white T-shirt, which was pulled up to expose most of his stomach, and a pair of Jockey briefs. The shorts were soiled, and there was the distinct odor of fecal matter in the air.

  Virgil bent over the body to look at the stomach. “Oh, Jesus,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  Trane bent over the body. “Do you think . . . ?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Seven words were scrawled in black ink in a wobbly hand on Renborne’s stomach: “I did it. I can’t stand it.”

  Virgil looked around, saw a black Sharpie pen poking out from under the other sheet. He pointed at it. “Pen.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Trane said.

  * * *

  —

  Back out in the hallway, Trane said to Quill, “Come on, honey,” and held Quill’s hand and led her down the stairs. Outside, a woman who lived on the lower floor brought a chair out, and Quill sat down.

  “Tell us about your day,” Trane said. “When did you last hear from your friend?”

  “His name is Brett Renborne. I called him last night to see if he was going to be around this afternoon, but he said he had a class at one o’clock, and I had one from two to four, so I tried calling him after class.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know, but I . . . Wait a minute.” She pulled a cell phone from her back pocket, clicked it on, thumbed it a couple of times, then said, “At four twenty-three and at four forty-one. I tried to call him twice. I don’t live far from here. I checked my email, and after a while I decided to just walk over here and knock, to see if he was sleeping or something. His door was unlocked, and I peeked in and . . . I knew he was dead. He looked like a dead person in a movie. I went in. I couldn’t
believe it. I wanted to scream, or something, but couldn’t. I had this police card from Mr. Virgil in my purse, so I called. And then I could scream . . .”

  “Do you know what time that was? When you found him?”

  “About one minute before I called Mr. Virgil . . . Wait. That’s not right, is it, Mr. Virgil?”

  “Close enough,” Virgil said. He checked his phone. “Virgil’s my first name . . . And you called me at five fifty-one.”

  “That’s when I found him,” she said.

  She said that Renborne had experimented, in serial fashion rather than simultaneously, with marijuana, cocaine, LSD, and opium, because he said the drugs loosened up his mind. The heroin was more recent, Quill said. She’d argued against it, but he said that he wouldn’t get addicted because he was careful and only did it once a week and would quit in a month or two.

  “I believed him. He was good with drugs,” Quill said. “He’d try them and then he’d quit. Except for weed. But, I mean, who doesn’t do weed?”

  A dingy-looking sedan pulled to the curb, and Roger Bryan got out, looked at them, and said, “Oh, shit.”

  Virgil said, “Hey, Rog. This is Megan Quill, Dr. Quill’s daughter. She found the victim.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “You don’t have to repeat yourself,” Trane said. “We’ve already said it a few times.”

  Another car pulled in, and a thin black woman got out, grabbed a briefcase. She looked past Bryan, and said, “Virgil Fuckin’ Flowers. I’m living the nightmare.”

  “How are you, Honey?”

  “Where’ve you been, man? Somebody said you went out for coffee ten years ago and never came back.” Honey Marshall was a longtime medical examiner’s investigator who’d look at the body before it was moved. As she walked up, she eye-checked Bryan and Trane, and said, “What’ve we got here? Some kind of multi-agency cop convention?”