Bloody Genius

by John Sandford

  —

  He parked by the barn, and Frankie came out of the house, and said, “Let’s go eat in town. I’m starving and don’t feel like cooking anything.”

  “Gimme kiss,” Virgil said. She gave him a kiss, and he held on for a while, and when Sam came up, skidding in the gravel, he said, “Holy shit, you guys are goin’ for it.”

  “You say ‘shit’ again and I’ll kick your ass,” Virgil said. “Or your mom will.”

  Frankie said to Sam, “It’s all right to say ‘shit’ sometimes, but only when it’s appropriate. You have to learn when it’s appropriate and you haven’t done that yet. I’m not sure I like that ‘goin’ for it,’ either.”

  Sam rolled his eyes, and said to Virgil, “Throw me some passes.”

  “How about some grounders instead? You’re never playing football, if I can help it, so there’s no point in practicing.”

  “You played football.”

  “I was stupid,” Virgil said.

  And so on. The usual.

  * * *

  —

  They went into town and got a pepperoni pizza, saving a slice for Honus, who was waiting impatiently in the back of the truck, knowing what was coming. They talked about this and that and a house that Frankie was bidding on, for demolition, and how she’d found online plans for a horse stable she thought might be right for the farm. “I took them up to Dave Jensen, and he’s going to print them out on his architectural printer. He said he’d do it today and drop them off tomorrow morning on the way to church.”

  And they talked about Brett overdosing, if that’s what had happened.

  “It’s very strange, especially the note on his stomach. ‘I did it. I can’t stand it.’ He must’ve meant he killed Quill. But, jeez, he didn’t seem like the type.”

  “You get in a jam and you react,” Frankie said. “You don’t think. If you could take it back, you would, but you can’t. That’s why you all think Quill was killed with a laptop—it was an impulse. You don’t plan to kill somebody with a laptop.”

  “Yeah, I know. He didn’t like Quill, he told me so himself,” Virgil said. “Then there’s the whole note thing, that it was written upside down from his perspective. How do you do that if you’re stoned on heroin?”

  “You don’t know the sequence,” Frankie pointed out. “Maybe he wrote the note sober and then got high later on, then went for the second injection. It’s like that could be the same kind of almost accident as killing Quill. You get freaked out, you react, and then you can’t take it back.”

  “I gotta think about it,” Virgil said. “When he wrote the note, there were no practice strokes, no do-overs.”

  “I’ll never use drugs,” Sam said. “I plan on dying because I ate too much pepperoni.”

  “You could do that,” Frankie said. “The way you pack it away, you could burn a hole right in the bottom of your stomach.”

  “Or, you could die because you decided to play football,” Virgil said. “Have you even looked at the Benson boys? John Benson’s your age and he’s gotta weigh a hundred pounds. What are you, sixty? He’d rip your head off.”

  “I’m too fast for that. He’d be standing there, holding his dick, and I’d be gone,” Sam said.

  “You say ‘dick’ again—”

  “I know, you’ll kick my ass,” Sam said. “Or Mom will.”

  “I don’t know where a kid his age gets this stuff,” Virgil said to Frankie. “Things have changed since I was in school.”

  Frankie was staring at him. “Virgil?”

  “What?”

  “He gets it from you. ‘Standing there, holding his dick.’ Or how about, last week, ‘His motorcycle is about the size of my dick’? I don’t even know if that’s supposed to mean it’s big or it’s small.”

  “Small for a motorcycle, big for . . .” He looked at Sam. “Anyway, I’ll start watching it. The language.”

  “Too late,” Frankie said. “This little twerp knows every word there is.”

  “That’s true,” Sam said. To Virgil: “You gonna eat that pepperoni?”

  “Fuckin’ A.” And to Frankie: “You said he knows all the words.”

  * * *

  —

  At the house, they had some cleaning and straightening to do, and Virgil’s clothes to wash and dry, then they watched a movie and all went to bed. Virgil and Frankie fooled around for a while, after which the house was quiet.

  The next morning, Dave Jensen dropped off the drawings for the stable, and they spent an hour going over them. Virgil agreed that his building skills were probably up to the task, with a bit of paid help. “I could do the inside electric, but I’d want help bringing it down from the pole.”

  “Help? We’re gonna hire somebody to do the electric, period. I don’t even want you in the vicinity.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt to have another well, either,” Virgil said. “Either that or get some work done on the one we’ve got. It’s gotta be eighty years old.”

  * * *

  —

  Later in the day, they checked on Virgil’s house, which he was still leasing until November, and made two trips between Virgil’s and the farm, moving more of his belongings. He’d have to do some touch-up painting where Honus had scratched up the doors, but that could wait.

  All minor stuff, but it sucked up most of the afternoon. After supper, Sam had to do homework, and Virgil and Frankie talked about a couple of possible wildlife articles that Virgil might do that would still keep him close to home.

  And they talked about the case.

  “You’ve been brooding about it all day,” Frankie said.

  He told her about Harry’s theory that he knew the killer because that’s the way it would work on a TV show.

  “Okay, that’s nuts,” she said.

  “He’s right about one thing: I’ve had any number of people who could turn into suspects but haven’t. Not yet anyway. I’m almost to the point where I think it’s a stranger who did the killing. Somebody broke into the carrel—”

  “He didn’t break in,” Frankie said.

  “Right, didn’t break in. Okay, that’s a problem, because then there had to be a key.”

  “It’s like this: there was somebody lurking in the library, looking for something to steal . . .”

  “But, like you said, there’s no sign of a break-in,” Virgil said. “He would have had to hide himself in the library and then come out after everybody was gone. Why’d he wait so long? Why’d he wait until midnight if he could have done it at ten o’clock?”

  “Too many people around,” Frankie said. “You said there were dorms all around the library, and it was a Friday night.”

  Virgil nodded. “I’ll give you that one. He didn’t move until there was nobody to see him coming out. Seems weird. But, okay . . .”

  “Did you check on janitors and maintenance guys? Maybe there’s somebody around after closing who stays into the night.”

  “Trane did all of that and came up empty.”

  “Anyway, he was in there, hiding, when Quill came in. Quill opened the door, picked up his computer, and then saw the guy. There’s some pushing but no injuries, and Quill says he’s calling the cops, and the guy gets the computer away from him and hits him with it.”

  “Quill didn’t open the door,” Virgil said. “Our hooker said he saw the guy way before Quill got to the carrel and jumped him. Quill wouldn’t have had time to use his key.”

  “But you think the key was used, that the door was opened, the computer was taken out and used as a weapon?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he was hit with something else, and the killer used Quill’s keys to open the door. Quill may have had them in his hand because he’d opened the outside library door with them and was planning to open the carrel’s door. The killer needed to hide the body, so he opened the doo
r—the carrel’s—dragged the body inside, saw the computer, knew he could hock it for something, maybe a lot . . .”

  They hashed that theory over for a while, came to no conclusions. Quill may have known the killer, but it could just as well have been a stranger.

  * * *

  —

  “The other weird thing about the whole case is the number of possibilities that seem to pop up in our faces,” Virgil said. “They keep coming in and they keep going nowhere.”

  Frankie lay back on the couch and slipped her toes under Virgil’s thigh. “My toes are cold. So, like, what possibilities?”

  “We had Quill and Katherine Green, the head of the Cultural Science Department, in a bitter feud that actually involved a little violence. An assault. We got a CD that looked like blackmail, but it never panned out. We found a twist of cocaine in Quill’s desk and a note that said he bought it from a dealer named China White, but there apparently is no China White—not a person named that anyway, it’s slang for ‘heroin.’ Quill might have had a girlfriend, but we couldn’t find her; she supposedly wore English riding clothes, had a black German shepherd called Blackie, and hung out at Starbucks. We couldn’t find her, but we were told that a black woman in English-style riding clothes hung out at that same Starbucks and that there was a handicapped guy with a German shepherd, but not a black one, just a regular one . . . It’s all very weird . . . Then we have Terry Foster . . .”

  Virgil went on for a while, and, when he was done, Frankie asked to hear his rerecording of the CD. He played it for her, from his cell phone, and she said, “It sounds like blackmail all right. If that was on a CD that he was listening to right before he was killed.”

  “It was. It was in his CD player, in his office.”

  They both thought about that for a while, and then Frankie said, “That CD was sure to be found with a detailed search.”

  “Not a sure thing,” Virgil said.

  “But it was found,” she said. “Just like the cocaine.”

  “You think the recording was faked?”

  “It is odd.”

  Virgil rubbed his chin, played the recording again. “It’s even a little tortured. That line about Quill strutting around like a peacock.”

  Frankie yanked her toes out from under Virgil’s leg and sat up. “Virgil! A woman in English riding clothes . . . a guy who’s a peacock . . . a woman named Green . . . a person named China White . . . a dog named Blackie . . .” She was excited.

  Virgil was puzzled. “Yeah?”

  Frankie: “They’re all names from the game of Clue. Green. White. Peacock. I’m pretty sure there’s a Mr. Black who’s the murdered guy. Wait, I’ve got Clue somewhere in the closet.”

  “I’ve never played it,” Virgil said. She went to get the game, and Virgil called after her, “Megan Quill had Clue in her closet.”

  She came back, said, “We’re missing some pieces, but here’s the whole thing about ‘Mr. Peacock killed him with a candlestick in the library.’ You know that bit?”

  “I’ve heard something like that.”

  She told him about the game, showed him the pieces, the clues, the rooms . . .

  “So Mrs. Green killed Dr. Quill in the library with the computer.”

  Virgil lay back on the couch and closed his eyes. “Yeah. But it wasn’t Mrs. Green.” Then, after a moment, he said, “I gotta go online and look at Wikipedia. Back in a minute.”

  In a minute, he was back. “There’s nobody named Black in the American version. Clue was originally called Cluedo and was invented by an English guy. The victim was named Black, but in the American version that was changed to Mr. Boddy.”

  “I knew about Boddy,” Frankie said. “I thought that was pretty clever. Not.”

  “All those clues,” Virgil said. “From an Anglophile game freak who was dragging us all over the goddamn Cities with fake clues. From a freakin’ board game.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil called Trane. She answered with, “Flowers, you figured it out?”

  “Yeah, we did, me and Frankie—mostly Frankie. I know who killed Quill and probably Brett Renborne.”

  Trane crunched on something, maybe an apple. She paused. “Okay. Well, don’t keep me waiting. Who was it?”

  “Jerry Krause. Who, twenty-four hours ago, was crying his lyin’ eyes out about his dead buddy Brett.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Virgil met with Trane and Lieutenant Carl Knox in Knox’s office the next morning so Virgil could lay out the argument for Knox. “It’s gonna sound weird. It is weird. This whole case is weird,” Virgil said.

  He and Frankie had diagrammed the arguments on a yellow legal pad the night before with a variety of arrows demonstrating how one thought led to another and eventually to the conclusion about Jerry Krause. Knox took in the mess of notes—annotations in the margins, inserts, underlines, yet more arrows—and said, “Tell me one thing to start with. Why’d he do it? This Krause kid.”

  “It’s so basic that we didn’t see it. He simply wanted the computer,” Virgil said. “He didn’t want anything in the computer. He didn’t want data or software or any of that. It had nothing to do with the feud between Cultural Science and the medical guys. He wanted the fuckin’ computer because it was the fastest thing he’d ever seen and he’s a crazy gamer. He’s obsessed with games. I actually saw him slap his Mac laptop because it was too slow. Slapped it. Called it a piece of shit. I’d bet my left nut that he’s still got Quill’s machine.”

  “With twins on the way, you probably don’t need your left nut anymore, so that’s not much of a bet,” Trane said.

  Knox waved her off. “Stay focused. What are all those scribbled notes?”

  “We kept adding things that seemed relevant, stuff that we knew. First of all, from something she said, I’m almost certain that Megan Quill took her friends over to her father’s house at one time or another. We can talk to Megan about that. Both Renborne and Krause knew him, they both disliked him, so there was some contact. I’d be willing to bet that’s where Krause found out about the laptop in the library. Quill had three cars. He had a fob for each of them, with lots of keys on them—for his house, his lab, his various offices and the carrel, and probably for the library’s outer doors. I wouldn’t be surprised that if we looked at all three, we’d find that one of them is missing the library keys. Because Krause was inside the house, knew what they were, and he took them.”

  “How would he know which keys were which?”

  Virgil shrugged. “I don’t know. But if you’re smart, you could find out. Like, if Quill had two similar keys and three different ones on each fob, then the two similar keys would be for the library.”

  “That’s thin,” Trane said.

  “I know, but if I could figure it out, I think Krause could, too. I’d be interested to know if Megan had a key to her father’s house and knew the security code. If she did, that would mean that she and her friends could have been in the house when Quill wasn’t. Could have looked around.”

  Trane said, “I’ve been talking to the Ramsey medical examiner. They say Renborne’s death is suspicious. The cause of death is definitely an overdose. The manner of death they’re going to list as undetermined—possibly accident, suicide, or homicide. The question is, why would Krause have killed him?”

  “Because Renborne figured it out,” Virgil said.

  “Couldn’t prove it now,” Knox said. “Unless he told somebody else.”

  “Like Megan,” Trane said.

  “She could be in jeopardy herself if she’s figured out who killed her father or who killed Renborne,” Virgil said. “Krause wants to get in her pants. If he gets in and there’s some pillow talk . . .”

  “We need to talk to that girl,” Trane said.

  “Let’s go with Virgil’s line of thought here
,” Knox said, “the rest of your scribbles.”

  “Terry Foster got attacked,” Virgil said. “He had talked to Megan Quill, Renborne, and Krause on the street, over by St. Thomas. I called him last night. He said he never identified himself, but when I pushed him, he said he drove his car past them. If Krause saw his license plate—he’s a hacker—and if he looked at the DMV, he’d have Foster’s home address. And Krause exactly fits Foster’s description of his attacker.”

  “There’s more?” Knox asked.

  “All kinds of stuff,” Virgil said. He was talking a hundred miles an hour. “When I was talking to Megan Quill the first time, Krause was there—that’s when he slapped his laptop—and he did perfect imitations of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. We have people who say the person on the CD sounded like Barth Quill, but maybe not exactly like him. They’re doubtful.”

  “So Krause can do voices—like the CD, and China White tip we got,” Trane said.

  “Yeah. And the rest of it: there’s a Clue game in Megan Quill’s closet, and he’s a fanatic gamer. He’s been toying with us, all those Clue names: Green, White, Peacock, Blackie, the dog. Here’s another thing: he went to high school in England for eleventh grade, and Megan said he came back with an accent. He said Barth Quill’s girlfriend was wearing English riding clothes and had a dog named Blackie. Well, in the English version Clue Mr. Black is the victim; in the American version, it’s Mr. Boddy. Krause played the game in England . . . I don’t believe there’s actually a girlfriend; I think he made her up of composites of people he saw in that Starbucks—a woman in riding clothes, a guy with a dog.”

  Knox pressed his index finger to his lips, thinking, then said, “Okay. I’m buying it.”

  “So am I,” Trane said. “Because I’ve got one more thing that Virgil doesn’t.”

  Virgil: “What?”

  “After you called last night, I got up early and got Krause’s phone records,” Trane told Virgil. “His phone was often blacked out, as if he’d pulled the battery.”