Bloody Genius (25 page)

“You told me there wasn’t a struggle,” Quill said to Trane.

“Well, a tussle. An argument. Your father turns away, and Brett hits him.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Brett didn’t want to have anything to do with violence.”

Virgil: “You said he experimented with cocaine. When was that? How long ago?”

“A while ago. During the summer. I don’t know exactly.”

“Do you know where he got it?”

“No. I’m not up to date on coke dealers, but I don’t think he had to go very far. He liked to go to clubs when he had the money. You can get coke if you go to the right clubs.”

“Did he ever mention a dealer named China White?” Trane asked.

“No. He never mentioned any dealers.” She put both hands on her forehead. “I can’t believe he’s dead. Right over there. He’s dead. He was alive last night. Now he’s dead.”

Trane patted her on the shoulder. “Look. Let’s go back outside, get some air . . . Virgil, we need to talk.”

Outside, Bryan spent a few moments getting names from Quill: Renborne’s parents, other friends. The landlady said she’d heard Renborne speaking on his cell phone early that morning, before she got up, when he was coming back from a late night out. “I heard him on the steps about, mmm, six o’clock.”

“Was he usually up that early in the morning?”

“Not usually, but that boy would come and go at all times of day and night. Sometimes, he was just getting home at six. Sometimes, he’d be going out the door at six. I got so I didn’t pay much attention.”

“Did you hear him during the day? He had a class at one.”

“No, I’m not here. I get up around seven, I go to work at eight-thirty, I get back at four-thirty or five, depending. Sometimes the other girls and I go out after work.”

She worked as a secretary at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul. She was divorced, and Renborne was the only other
person who lived in the house. “My ex never lived here. We broke up, split the money, and I bought this place with my share.”

“Are you sure it was Brett that you heard going up the steps this morning?” Virgil asked.

She shrugged. “Sounded like him. He wore running shoes, he was quiet.”

Renborne, she said, was “a real nice boy. I had no idea he was fooling with drugs. I never saw him, you know, drugged up or anything.”

Virgil and Trane drifted away. Trane asked, “Are you still going home?”

“I’d like to. This isn’t our scene, and St. Paul will do the work. I’ll be back on Monday morning. They should have some labs by then, an autopsy report. Not much for me to do on a Sunday.”

“All right. How are we doing otherwise?”

“I can’t . . . I don’t see where we’re going yet.”

“Neither do I. By the way, your guy Nash . . . Our guys broke into some of the files on the computer. There are some other files there that are encrypted, we’ll probably never get into those. But of the files we’ve seen, a couple of dozen of them were photographs transferred out of a program called Lightroom.”

“I know it,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, and it’s got this metadata stuff. The photos apparently were taken the same night Quill was killed, unless they’ve been faked somehow.”

“So we gave him his alibi.”

“And solidified the charges of industrial espionage,” Trane said. “Which doesn’t solve my problem.”

Virgil said, “I’m going to run down to Faribault, see if I can find this Jerry Krause kid. It’s not exactly on my way, but it’ll only add twenty minutes or so to my drive time. If he hasn’t changed his driver’s license, he should have a home address on it.”

“Okay. You think he’ll know anything?”

“Nah, not really. But the three of them were a gang, and not an entirely healthy one. I oughta check.”

Virgil said good-bye to Quill and headed south on I-35. Faribault was a bit less than an hour straight south, and, on the way, he talked to the duty officer at the BCA and got Krause’s home address. He got turned around once he was in town, but he found the house with help from his iPhone map app; it was an older but well-kept neighborhood whose maple trees were already showing a hint of autumn orange. An older woman came to the door, looking sleepy, said she was Jerry’s mother. “He’s not in trouble, is he?”

“No. A good friend of his has died, and it’s possible that it’s suicide. We’re talking to his friends—”

“Oh, boy, not Brett?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Oh, boy. Oh, Jerry’s going to be upset,” she said. “Let me get my jacket. He just walked over to the Kwik Trip.”

Virgil and Krause’s mother, whose name was Connie, walked a zigzag course four blocks over to the Kwik Trip and saw Krause walking back toward them, eating an ice cream cone. “Always with the ice cream,” his mother said.

Krause stopped eating the cone as they came up, and he said, “You’re that Virgil officer.”

“Yes. Have you heard from Brett recently? Talk to him at all this morning or last night?”

“No. Why? What happened?”

“I’m afraid he’s dead,” Virgil said.

Krause started, his hand tilted, and the top of his cone fell on the grass verge. He cried, “Shit,” and kicked it into the street. “Oh my God!” Tears came to his eyes, and he asked, “Was it drugs?”

“It looks that way,” Virgil said. “Did you know—”

“Does Megan know?”

“She found him.”

“Oh my God! I gotta get up there. She’s gonna be wrecked.”

“Did you know he was using?”

“Yeah, I did,” Krause said. “Megan and I—we tried to get him to stop. But he said it was just an experiment. He did all kinds of research on the internet, how much you could use, about addiction and all that. He used opium, is what he did. He said he got these great dreams, and he was going to write a book about it . . . Ah, God!”

“It wasn’t opium,” Virgil said. “It was probably heroin.”

“Ah, yeah, it could have been, he was talking about that. He didn’t tell me he’d started because I gave him so much shit about the other stuff.”

Tears were streaming down his face, and his mother patted him on the shoulder. “I’ll take you back up there,” she said. And to Virgil, “Jerry doesn’t have a car.”

Virgil asked a few questions. Krause had seen Renborne the afternoon before, and they had talked a while at the student center. Then his ride had shown up, and he and another student, Butch Olsen, had driven down to Faribault.

“When I saw Brett, he was perfectly cheerful. He wasn’t high.
He said he and Megan were going out that night, over to the U. I thought they’d probably spend the night at her place. They did that sometimes. I was invited, but I had to come back here: I was, like, wearing the same underwear for the third day running . . . Butch is going to pick me up tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll take you,” his mother said again.

He’d spoken to Megan once, Jerry said, that morning, about nothing. “She just called me, said she was walking around, might go over to Grand Avenue, look at some jeans. That’s all she really said. She was bored, and I think Brett was in class this afternoon.”

“Do you have any idea where he got his dope?”

Krause looked up at the sky and blinked. “He told me he got it from a woman in some skanky club up by the university. Maybe her name was White? . . . Yes, I think it was White . . . I think she got all the other shit, too. He told me once that his connection was Vietnamese, but I’m not sure that was the same person. I think it was, I’m just not sure.”

China White, Virgil thought. Vietnamese were nothing like Chinese, but if you were street scum in St. Paul, they probably didn’t spend a lot of time parsing the difference.

Virgil asked a few more questions that didn’t produce anything significant, and then they went back to the Krause place. “I may want to talk with you again,” he told Jerry. “If you could check with Brett’s friends, if they have any idea of where I could find his connection . . .”

“I will,” Krause said. He pressed the heels of his hands in his eye sockets, and said, “Ah, Jesus. Ah, shit . . .”

Virgil cut cross-country to the farm.

He hadn’t spent much time thinking about it because he hadn’t had children, but now that Frankie had a couple of his buns in the oven, it occurred to him that there could be no lower point in life than losing a kid. And when you have a kid, you’re putting a heavy mortgage on your future. Everybody dies eventually, but when you have a kid the best you can hope for is to die first. Preferably, in the distant future.

Brett Renborne hadn’t seemed like a bad kid, no more lost than a lot of guys who later turn out to be good people. The drugs were a little extreme, but, in his heart, Virgil could understand the experimentation. A bit lost himself, he’d wandered out of college and into the military, looking for adventure and willing to risk his neck for it. Brett had done something analogous, in a way, and had gone down. If he had decent parents, they’d be hurt more deeply than Brett ever was. Even in death.

When he came up on the farm, he saw Sam, Frankie’s youngest at eleven years old, rolling down the road on a fat-tire bike, Honus the Yellow Dog running along beside him in the weeds in the ditch. Sam looked back over his shoulder at Virgil’s approaching truck and waved, and Virgil felt a sudden pang of fear: a mortgage on your future.

Like, if this ever ends, because somebody dies too early, my life will be over . . .

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 door—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.”