Bloody Genius (21 page)

“Okay. Trane told me about this guy. But you don’t think he’s still doing that?”

Anderson said, “I heard—I don’t know where—that he moved over to industrial spying. Instead of faking patents, he’s looking for people willing to sell out original research. Real research. Go to Motorola and figure out what they were doing with phones and then try to peddle that information to Apple.”

Ann said, “I heard—I don’t know if it’s true—that some witness got caught lying in court about one of his patent trolls, and it looked like he could be in serious trouble, and so could the law firm he was working with. Subornation of perjury or something.”

“I heard that he and the law firm broke up, and that’s when he went to industrial spying,” Anderson added.

“And he might have approached somebody at this lab?”

“Not Barth, but a couple of surgeons over at the med school who worked with us. They told him to take a hike and reported Nash to the university,” Anderson said. “The guy lives here in the Minneapolis area, and he’s been known to snoop around Medtronic, Boston Scientific, 3M, St. Jude, and a whole bunch of hearing aid companies. Either Medtronic or Boston Scientific actually got a restraining order against him, is what I hear.”

“Any hint that he might be violent?” Virgil asked.

“Yes!” Rosalind said. “He was arrested for assault after he was caught trespassing somewhere. I remember seeing it in the
Star
Tribune
. I don’t remember where he was trespassing, but I remember the story.”

“The problem with Nash is, he has an alibi,” Virgil said. “If I’m remembering right, he was at a convention that night. There were several people who were willing to back him up on that.”

“Then he probably did it for sure,” Anderson said, leaning toward Virgil, a light in his eyes. “One thing I remember Barth telling me about him is that he always has an alibi. He never moves without an alibi. He’s been arrested at least a couple of times, but always had a story. Wasn’t there, didn’t do it. Wasn’t there when somebody talked directly to him. Barth and I were laughing about it. I was anyway.”

“Interesting,” Virgil said. “Boyd Nash.”

“That’s him,” Rosalind said. “I got a little chill when I thought of him. I think he could be something.”

Back across the river again in Minneapolis, Virgil found Trane, Cohen, Hardy, and a Hennepin County assistant attorney named Harmon Watts in an interview room at the jail. Virgil pulled Trane out—“We only need one minute”—and in the hallway told her about Boyd Nash.

“You think it could be something?”

“The lab people thought it was something,” Virgil said. “I think we’ve got to take a serious look at him.”

Back in the interview room, Watts asked, “What’s the history here?”

Virgil said, “You guys have to handle the details, I’m here as
Maggie’s assistant. But I proposed to Mr. Hardy that we weren’t so much interested in the various possible charges against Miz Cohen as we are in getting complete cooperation from her.”

“How will you know if you’re getting complete cooperation?” Watts asked.

“Because if we don’t think we’re getting it, we walk away and refile,” Trane said.

“I’m going to need a false arrest waiver,” Watts said.

“We’re okay with that,” Hardy said.

Cohen said, “Wait. False arrest? Can we sue them for this?”

“Not really,” Hardy said.

Watts: “If you don’t sign the waiver, we don’t drop the charges and you go to jail. ’Cause it wasn’t a false arrest, but we don’t want you coming back later saying that it was.”

Hardy: “She’ll sign.”

And so on and so forth. Cohen signed, Watts picked up the paper, said, “Bless you all,” and left.

Virgil and Trane started pushing Cohen. She and Quill had made three separate trips to the library, all in the middle of the night. “An adventure,” she said, which Quill seemed to enjoy. “I wasn’t all that big on it because that yoga mat wasn’t thick enough and it hurt my back and ass,” she added.

Quill paid her five hundred dollars per trip.

They’d met on Tinder, first hooking up in Dinkytown. She knew he was well-off because of the car, but she hadn’t known his real name. She’d asked, and he told her it was Alex Nolan. She’d later tried to look him up on the internet, and while she’d found lots of Alex Nolans, none of them seemed to be the man she was
having sex with. She hadn’t learned his real name until she’d seen a TV news story about his murder.

“So you did know about it,” Trane said. “In your apartment you told us—”

“She may have misspoken,” Hardy said. “Hardly a major issue.”

Cohen admitted that she knew that Quill must have been the man who’d taken her to the library, but said she was afraid to talk to the police. “I didn’t see how anything good could come from that. I mean, I didn’t know anything. And, you know, with my job and all, I’d be an easy one to pin it on.”

They took her through a second-by-second recital of their approach to the library. They’d met at a bar in Dinkytown, had walked across the campus, then across the footbridge, past a couple of dormitories, scouting the Wilson Library for lights.

“We saw some kids outside the dorms, around the dorms, but there was never anybody around that library. I mean, this was midnight,” she said. “The first two times, it was even later—like, one o’clock.”

Quill had a key. They entered the library, listened for sounds, heard none, then Quill took her hand and led her up a flight of steps to the second floor. His carrel was behind some high book stacks, and as they got close, they saw a light.

“I think it was an iPhone light. Alex—I mean, Dr. Quill—was holding my hand going up the stairs, but then we saw the light.”

Quill dropped her hand and whispered for her to stay where she was. She didn’t. She hid behind one of the tall bookshelves on the other side of the aisle from the shelves near the carrel. She heard Quill say something but wasn’t sure exactly what it was but thought he said he was calling the police. “I think I heard that word ‘police.’”

“Do you think they just ran into each other? Or was the killer waiting for Dr. Quill?” Virgil asked.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She squinted at the ceiling. “You know, why would he have the light on if he was trying to sneak? I think maybe it
was
an accident, that they ran into each other.”

Virgil: “Do you think the person, whoever it was, was already in the carrel when you got there?”

“Oh, yeah, I think so. Something else, you know, that I just thought of: I think Dr. Quill knew the person. Recognized him. I don’t know what he said, but the tone of his voice, it was like he knew him.”

“Maybe somebody from his lab?” Trane suggested.

“I don’t know. I’m not even sure about it. But when I think back, I think he recognized him. Knew him.”

She heard the struggle, heard the door close, thought she heard keys, but remained huddled behind the shelves where she thought she wasn’t visible. When the light headed toward the stairs, she didn’t look at it, or the man who carried it, because she was afraid he’d see her eyes. “I kept my head down. So I never saw this other person.”

Virgil asked about drugs. “I’m not going to hassle you about it, but I need to know. Do you use coke?”

“I’ve tried it,” she admitted. “The guy buys it and wants to party, you know? I don’t buy it myself. It’s nice, but it’s expensive.”

“Did you ever give any to Quill?”

“Oh, no. He never mentioned drugs to me. You know, he was intense about the sex. He even got me off once, which never happens, but he did it because he was so into it. But as far as I know, he wasn’t into dope.”

They went over the story twice more, but nothing changed.
Cohen had never been to Quill’s house, didn’t know he was a doctor. “I thought he was probably a finance guy. He acted like a finance guy. Except he didn’t fuck like a finance guy. He knew how to get it on. If you know what I mean.”

In the end, Trane said she’d go with Hardy to walk Cohen through the release procedures, which Watts had already approved. Virgil told Trane about talking to Foster and Foster’s suggestion that there must be something important on the missing laptop.

“Foster’s a smart guy, and he thinks the computer is the key, which would fit with this Boyd Nash character. When you think about it, if Nash is an industrial spy, it’d fit with the CD recording, too—an attempt at blackmail. Maybe he found out about the laptop but didn’t know Quill was . . . comforting . . . Miz Cohen.”

“‘Comforting,’” Trane repeated. “Nice.”

“You want to take Nash or should I?” Virgil asked.

“You found him, you take him. I’ll take a look at Hardy’s partner, this Jones guy. I’m interested in that whole sequence of events. Remember, Quill might not have practiced medicine, but he
was
an M.D. If he spotted that whole pill bottle problem—the one you spotted—and started mooting around the idea that Frank McDonald was murdered . . .”

Virgil concurred, and asked, “You want to look at my cut lip?”

“No, I believe you. But . . .”

“What?”

“Until you showed up, I was running a nice logical investigation. Somehow, Flowers, you got me up to my hips in weird shit. How’d you do that?”

Virgil started his run at Boyd Nash by going back to Trane’s desk at Minneapolis Homicide. He got Nash’s records from the DMV. Both his past and current driver’s licenses showed the same address. Virgil checked the address with the street view on Google Earth and found himself looking at a rambling ranch-style house, of white stone and natural wood, in the city of Edina, south of Minneapolis. A quick trip out to Zillow suggested the house would be worth something like a million and a half dollars.

If Nash was a thief, he was a good one.

Next he called up the files Trane had pulled from the National Crime Information Center. Boyd had been arrested twice for assault. First for going after a security guard at a Medtronic office in Fridley, a suburb of Minneapolis. That was a mistake: the security guard moonlighted as a bouncer at a biker bar and kicked Boyd’s ass before he called the cops.

The charges had been dismissed.

Then he was charged with domestic assault by a woman named Jon-Ellen Nord.

Again, the charges were dismissed.

Fridley was in Anoka County and he couldn’t raise anyone at the county attorney’s office, but the second arrest was in Hennepin County—in the city of Bloomington—and he did get an assistant county attorney in Hennepin and she was willing to give a little after-hours help.

She walked away from the phone for a few minutes, came back, and said that the woman who was attacked had dropped the charges. When the county attorney had resisted that decision, Nord had said that she’d overstated the seriousness of the attack.

Virgil: “What do you think?”

“There’s a totally improper note in the file,” the assistant county attorney said. “It says ‘The bitch was paid off.’ Remember that because I’m now removing it.”

“What do you think about that? The note?”

“I think the bitch was paid off,” she said.

“You got an address for her?”

Jon-Ellen Nord lived in a snug green bungalow on Minnehaha Creek in south Minneapolis, a distinctly upscale neighborhood with lots of trees and the creek running through backyards. There was a light in the window, but no cars in sight; there was a detached two-car garage in back, so the cars could be there. Virgil cruised by the place a couple of times before he slowed and pulled into the driveway. He could see the flicker of a television screen as he walked to the front door and rang the bell.

Jon-Ellen Nord was a lanky, small-headed, dark-haired woman with suspicious dark eyes. She was probably around fifty years old, Virgil thought. Virgil identified himself and held up his ID so she could read it, and, after she had, she pushed open the door, and asked, “What’s this about?”

“I’d like to talk to you about an acquaintance of yours, Boyd Nash.”

“Haven’t seen Boyd in a couple of years. What’s he done now?”

“I don’t know if he’s done anything. We’re looking at a serious crime, and his name came up. Could be nothing, but we have to check.”

“How serious a crime?”

“Murder,” Virgil said.

She pushed the door farther open, and said, “Come in.”

He followed her inside; she left behind a light trace of floral perfume that reminded him of the scent of lilies of the valley. The house itself was snug: older, with smaller rooms, hardwood floors, a fieldstone fireplace, and built-in bookshelves. Nord had cats, three of them. Two were tabbies, one red and one gray. The third was black and white with a pink nose. The tabbies were shy and peeked around corners. The black-and-white cat came up and rubbed against Virgil’s leg, and when Nord pointed Virgil at a chair, the cat made a move to jump on his lap. Nord grabbed it and deposited it on top of an upright piano. She took an overstuffed chair facing Virgil, and said, “If Boyd killed somebody, it was either an accident or involved really big money. He wouldn’t kill anybody unless there was a large payoff.”

“You think he could kill somebody?”

“Oh, sure. He’s a classic sociopath. Doesn’t care about anyone but number one,” she said. “He can be charming, if he tries, but
it’s always calculated. Taking care of number one would include staying out of jail. I’m sure you know he assaulted me, that’s why you’re here.”

“I saw that in a case file,” Virgil said. “Exactly what was the situation there?”

“He beat me up. We’d dated a couple of times—maybe three—and then I broke it off. He showed up at my door, right here, high as a kite and angry. I tried arguing with him through the screen door, and he grabbed the door handle and yanked the hook right out of the jamb,” Nord said. Her voice was flat, unemotional, as though she were talking about something she’d read. “I tried to push him out, and he started slapping me, and then he hit me with his fists. I had bruises all over my face and my rib cage. I hurt for weeks. Lucky for me, a neighbor was passing by with his wife, and they witnessed it and called nine-one-one. Boyd ran for it, but the neighbors jotted down the license plate number and the make of his car, and the police caught him less than a mile from here. He had blood on his hands.”

“But you dropped the charges.”

“We . . . came to a private settlement.”

“A large one?”

“I don’t want to get into numbers. It was substantial. I was at a critical stage in my entrepreneurial career, and the money was welcome. I inherited this place from my mother and mortgaged it to start my business and didn’t have enough money to expand when I needed to do that. Boyd, uh, filled the gap.”

She owned three coffeehouses, she said, in different but trendy parts of the Twin Cities. Virgil had been in one and liked it: the coffee was good, all the local papers were free, and
The New York Times
and
Wall Street Journal
were sold over the counter.

“Who’d he kill?” she asked.

Virgil explained that he was investigating the death of Barthelemy Quill, a professor at the University of Minnesota. Nord’s head started going up and down as soon as Virgil mentioned the name, said she’d read the news stories about the case.

“This all ties into his rather crappy career as a patent troll? Or his spying?”

“You knew about that?”

“Sure. He wasn’t embarrassed about it. He was right up front, in fact. He said if a company didn’t protect itself, it deserved what it got.” She shook her head. “He crossed a lot of lines, though. He would actually spy on companies, I think. He got beat up once by a security guard. He could beat on a woman, I guess, but apparently wasn’t real good against somebody who actually knew how to fight.”

“I have a note about that,” Virgil said. “He was charged in that case, too, and it was also dismissed.”

“I don’t know what happened there, but I knew about it,” she said. “He was a slippery fuck, if you’ll excuse the language. That was my final verdict.”

“As far as you know, did Nash have a relationship with Dr. Quill?” Virgil asked.

“I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t know much about what Boyd did, the details. I picked up a little in conversation while we were going out, and of course I looked him up on the internet. I don’t even know why I went out with him that third time. I didn’t like him that much on the first date, but I guess I decided to give him a second chance, and then maybe I went out the third time because I was bored. I wasn’t bored enough to go out a fourth time. Then he beat me up.”

“You said he was high when he beat you. That doesn’t sound like marijuana.”

“Cocaine, his drug of choice. I doubt he ever tried marijuana. Or, if he did, not more than once. It was always cocaine.”

They talked for another ten minutes, but she didn’t have much to add. They’d never gotten to a sexual relationship—not even close.

Virgil asked about Nash’s friends. “I don’t think he had any real friends, but he did have, like, an acolyte. This guy who followed him around and did chores for him. His name was Dex—short for Dexter, I think. I don’t know if I ever knew Dex’s last name. He was a short, stumpy guy. Like one of the Seven Dwarfs, only two feet taller. Among other things, I think he got Boyd’s dope for him. I’m not sure if Dex knew a dealer or was a dealer, but he held Boyd’s coke.”

“If you only went out three times, how did you get to know Dex?”

She smiled for the first time. “Because he sorta came on the date with us. All three times he was in the backseat when Boyd showed up, then Boyd would drop him off somewhere near the place we were going for dinner, he’d disappear, and I wouldn’t see him again until the next date. He had a line of patter he’d keep going from the backseat: news stories, stuff about the city, about where we were going, about people he knew. It was weird. I actually sorta liked Dex better than Boyd, except he was funny-looking. A funny-looking guy. I think he was probably in his thirties maybe. But he looked old. He had a sixty-year-old face.”

When Virgil ran out of questions, Nord said, “I hope you get him. I know I shouldn’t have settled, but I really, really needed the money. And Virgil”—she reached across the gap between
their chairs and touched his knee—“you be careful. I do think Boyd could kill somebody. Maybe he already has. He’s a bullshitter, but there’s a mean bastard under that fat face.”

Virgil was on his way out the door when he was struck by a thought. He turned back, and asked, “You wouldn’t have a picture of him, would you?”

Nord said, “Hmm, probably. I take pictures of everyone and never clean them out of my phone. Let me look.”

She scanned photos for a moment, her thumbs and fingers moving as fast as a longtime typist’s, and then: “Ah. Here we go. What’s your number, I’ll send it to you.”

A moment later, it popped up on Virgil’s phone: a smiling, overweight man with reddish brown hair pulled back in a ponytail.

Back in his car, he called O’Hara, the map thief. When she answered, he said he was going to send her a photo. “Could you take a moment to look at it?”

“Of course.”

He sent the picture, and a moment later O’Hara said, “That’s the man.”

His next call went to Del Capslock, got his wife. He knew Cheryl, and they chatted about Frankie’s pregnancy for a moment while Capslock got out of the bathroom. When he did, Cheryl handed him the phone. “What’s up?”

“Did you ever know a guy named Dex, maybe Dexter, may or may not have dealt drugs, looks like a taller version of one of the Seven Dwarfs?”

“Sure. Dexter Hamm. He’s a hangout guy, does this and that.”

“Selling drugs?”

“Maybe, at one time or another, but not as a profession. He might have dealt to friends as a favor. Deals a little real estate, buys cars out at the auction, resells them. He puts this guy with that guy, and deals get done. He’s been around forever, knows everybody. Like that.”

“A street guy, then,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, but not a bottom-feeder. He’ll make a few bucks by the end of the year.”

“Where would I find him?”

“Damned if I know,” Capslock said. “He’s more Minneapolis than St. Paul. I’ve never been to his place, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a set address. Check the DMV.”

“Thanks for that,” Virgil said.

“Sure. Hamm—two ‘m’s. I get the feeling that I’m your new go-to guy for dirtbag contacts.”

“Well, yeah.”

According to the DMV, Hamm lived in a condo in what used to be the warehouse district adjacent to downtown Minneapolis. Though it was getting late, Virgil decided to take a shot at a contact and headed downtown.

Hamm’s place was a brick-and-glass cube, a couple of decades old, with a keypad at street level to get into the lobby and a video camera that looked down at a brass plate with buttons for each individual apartment. Hamm was listed, and when Virgil pushed the button, he answered, “Do I know you?”

“No. I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I need to speak to you for a few minutes.”

“About what?”

“Boyd Nash.”

“We’re no longer associated,” Hamm said.

“I still need to speak to you. Push the button for the door or it’ll get unnecessarily complicated.”

After a moment of silence, the door buzzer sounded, and Virgil pushed inside. Hamm lived on the third floor, and Virgil took the stairs, both because he needed the exercise and because if Hamm ran for it he’d probably take the stairs.

Virgil met no one coming down, and when he emerged in a third floor lobby, he saw Hamm standing down the hall at an open door; he
did
look like a taller version of one of the Seven Dwarfs—Sneezy, Virgil thought.

On the other hand, his voice sounded like Waylon Jennings’s. He said, “In here,” and led the way into his apartment. “What’s your name?”

“Virgil Flowers.”

“Flowers? I used to know a Tommy Flowers, out of Chicago.”

“No relation,” Virgil said.

Hamm’s apartment was like an unconscious man cave—not designed to be one, but it was—two brown corduroy-covered easy chairs, with a matching ottoman for each, facing an oversized TV with five-foot-high speakers on either side of it tuned to an all-sports channel, the baked-in scent of cigars and microwaved mac ’n’ cheese, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at the condo across the street.

Hamm pointed at one of the chairs, and said, “This has got to be way after duty hours. Want a beer?”

“Sure,” Virgil said.

Hamm got two Dos Equis out of his refrigerator, popped off
their caps with a counter-mounted opener, handed one to Virgil, settled into the other brown chair, and asked, “What’s that asshole up to now? Boyd.”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“We haven’t been associated for more than a year,” Hamm said. “I set up a deal on a nice piece of property off Lake Nokomis: little old lady died and left a teardown sitting on a gold mine. The relatives—the heirs—were out in Dayton, didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. Nobody saw it but me. My piece would have been fifty K. And Boyd fucked me out of it.”

“I’ve been told that he’s ethically challenged,” Virgil said.

Hamm snorted. “That’s the kindest description you could put on him.” He poured some beer down his throat, coughed, then asked, “What are you looking for?”