“And he was full of this stuff?”
“Yup. At least twenty-eight or twenty-nine, maybe as many as thirty to thirty-two. That’ll do it. Eighty milligrams can kill you, and he probably swallowed more than three hundred.”
“Fingerprints on the pill bottle?”
“Only Mr. McDonald’s. Frankly, if I was facing what he was facing, the inability to move anything but his head and with partial use of one arm, I’d do the same thing,” Parker said. “I’ve got nothing but sympathy for the poor man.”
Virgil picked up the autopsy photos. One of them showed McDonald’s mouth stretched open, with a couple of tiny flecks of white plastic between his teeth.
“So he chewed through the bottle.”
“Right. Mrs. McDonald had left it on a tray attached to the bed. She had no idea he could move his arm enough to reach the pills. But he did. We think he managed to bump the tray with his shoulder hard enough that the bottle fell over. Then he bumped the tray until the bottle fell off the tray and onto his arm. He grabbed it with the fingers of the other hand and pinned it to his chest, where he could reach it with his mouth. He still had good motion in his upper neck and head—he could turn it—and we think he managed to get the bottle in his mouth. He then chewed the cap until it came off, and, holding the bottle in his teeth, tipped his head back far enough to get the pills to fall into his mouth. Then he swallowed them. We also found fragments of the plastic cap in his gut.”
Virgil had a lot of sympathy for McDonald, too, but the police world didn’t run on sympathy, it ran on checks. He left the Medical Examiner’s Office and drove to a Walgreens drugstore, where he showed his ID to a pharmacist and was given four empty amber pill bottles with white plastic caps identical to the ones in the evidence box.
Then he sat in his truck and chewed one of them. And called Trane, who’d not yet gotten on the witness stand. “Complete clusterfuck in there,” she said. “What happened with you?”
Virgil told her about his visit to the medical examiner and about the bits of white plastic in McDonald’s mouth and stomach. “I went over to a Walgreens—that’s where his prescription had been filled—and got some of those pill bottles and tried to chew one of them open. I stopped because I was afraid I’d break my teeth. I did get the cap ragged enough that I cut my lip twice, and probably jabbed it three or four more times, but I had a hell of a time chewing that cap without dropping it, which I did. I kept having to pick it up and put it back in my mouth, and McDonald couldn’t do that.”
“And . . .”
“As far as I could tell from the photos, McDonald hadn’t done any damage at all to his lip. Pieces of plastic in his mouth, but no physical damage, and I don’t see how that would be avoidable. Also, the bottle had only his fingerprints on it. It should have had a lot of Mrs. McDonald’s prints because she was supposedly dispensing his medicine. It’s almost like somebody wiped the bottle clean of hers and then printed it with his.”
“Picture me weeping,” Trane said. “Are you telling me that McDonald was murdered?”
“I think assisted suicide is a possibility.”
“Connecting the dots, then, McDonald was either murdered by his wife or helped along to kill himself, and she then hired the Hardy firm to represent her in a lawsuit, where they learn about Quill’s financial status and realize that if he were killed and were then unable to defend himself—”
“They could make a lot of money,” Virgil said. “A tub of money.”
“To get him in a private place where they could do the deed, they got Hardy’s other client, Cohen, to set him up. I talked to Cohen long enough to know that this was her third trip to the library. If she was familiar with the routine, she could probably have done something to the door to keep it open after Quill used his key.”
“We should at least keep all that in mind,” Virgil said.
“At least,” Trane said. “What’s your next step?”
“I’ll talk to Mrs. McDonald. See if she’s strong enough to lift a laptop over her head. If she killed once—”
“You, of course, see the fly in that particular ointment.”
“Maybe not.”
“The man who attacked your Mr. Foster: Foster says it definitely was a man, and a fairly large one. Not tall, but heavy.”
“We’ll call it a mugging,” Virgil said.
“That’s not what you were calling it before,” Trane said.
“That’s when I thought I had a lead,” Virgil said. “Now things have gotten funkier. I will call you as soon as I know something.”
“Wish I was there.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Trane had spoken to Brennan, the university’s lawyer, about the lawsuit, but had never talked to McDonald. Virgil found McDonald’s first name—Ruth—in the lawsuit, ran her full name through the DMV, found three Ruth McDonalds in Minneapolis and St. Paul, cross-referenced it with Frank McDonald, found three Franks, but only one common address among the six.
Virgil needed to get a sandwich before he went hunting for McDonald. He thought for a moment, then called BCA headquarters and asked for Jenkins or Shrake, the BCA’s resident thugs. Shrake was there, picked up a phone, and asked, “What do you want? Wait. I know. You want me to drive to some godforsaken shithole on the edge of SoDak where somebody will shoot me in the eye with a BB gun—”
Virgil interrupted. “St. Louis Park.”
“St. Louis Park?” He sounded nonplussed. St. Louis Park was an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis. “What do I have to do?”
“Scare the shit out of a middle-class woman,” Virgil said.
“Huh. Sounds like fun. What else do I get out of it?”
“I’m driving over to the Red Cow Uptown before I go find her,” Virgil said. “I’ll buy.”
“See you there in twenty,” Shrake said.
“Sounds unlikely, but I’ll wait.”
* * *
—
Virgil was sitting on the street down from the Red Cow Uptown, chatting with Frankie on his cell phone, when Shrake pulled up beside him, held up a wrist with a Rolex on it, tapped the watch face twice, and went up the street and around a corner. He was walking back a minute later, debonair in a summer-weight gray wool suit, white shirt, and shiny blue silk tie. Virgil caught him at the door of the Red Cow.
“I didn’t understand the watch signal,” Virgil said.
“Twenty minutes on the dot,” Shrake explained. “I had to do a little shake ’n’ bake on 94. There might be an eighteen-wheeler up in the weeds.”
Shrake was a large man with a complicated nose set over too-white implanted teeth—replacements for teeth he’d broken or had knocked out over the years. The last time he’d worked a major case with Virgil, he’d been grazed with a broadhead arrow. The arrow left a foot-long scar between his shoulder blades that Shrake claimed had tightened up his golf swing and cut three strokes off his handicap.
“I made the mistake of saying that out loud,” Shrake said, as they took a table. “If I’d kept my mouth shut, and my old handicap, I’d have made a thousand bucks by now.”
“I feel sorry for you not being able to cheat,” Virgil said. He handed Shrake a menu. “Get what you want, I’m going with the Double Barrel.”
* * *
—
Virgil told him all about the Quill case—everything he had. Shrake had been following the story in the papers but hadn’t heard anything else, other than that Margaret Trane was working the case. “Trane and I had a thing once, back when we were young.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear this,” Virgil said.
“I’m not going to tell you anything else . . . other than the fact that when you got out of Maggie Trane’s bed, you definitely knew you’d been in bed with Maggie Trane. I lost about five pounds that first night.”
“She’s married n
ow,” Virgil said. “A doctor.”
“I know. He’s a fourteen handicap out at Edina.”
“Jesus, Shrake, your mind is like a golf garbage dump.”
“Golf is the only thing in there that’s not garbage,” Shrake said. “Tell me again about chewing up those pill bottle caps . . . You say McDonald had fragments in his mouth?”
“Fragments, but no cuts on his lip. Could be murder, could be assisted suicide, but I don’t think he swallowed the pills on his own.”
“Why didn’t the medical examiner catch it?” Shrake asked.
“Probably because they didn’t have anyone dumb enough to chew on a pill bottle,” Virgil said. He pulled at his lower lip and it hurt. “I cut the heck out of myself and never even got the cap off.”
“Poor baby.”
* * *
—
As they were finishing lunch, Virgil got a call from an unknown number.
“Mr. Flowers?” A woman’s voice, high and shaky. “Officer Flowers?”
“Yes?”
“This is Genevieve O’Hara. You interviewed me about Dr. Quill.”
“Yes, of course,” Virgil said.
“I wanted to tell you my mother died yesterday afternoon.”
“I’m sorry. I hope she went peacefully,” Virgil said.
“Well, of course she was heavily drugged, so I suppose it was peaceful as it could be. But that’s neither here nor there. I was actually calling you about Dr. Quill.”
“Yes?”
“After you were here . . . Well, not right after, I didn’t think of it until the next day but didn’t call because I’ve been so preoccupied with Mother . . . Well, this morning I saw your card and thought I’d better call . . . I didn’t steal those maps, by the way,” she said.
“I believe you,” Virgil said, though he didn’t. He was curious about where the conversation was going.
“Thank you. Last winter, Mother was still conscious and getting around, and I remember telling her about this . . . I was working up on the second floor at the Wilson, where Dr. Quill’s carrel was, and I saw this man. He was looking at books in the stacks. You know how sometimes you can watch a child doing something and you know he’s only pretending to do it? Like, he’s pretending to look at your silverware but he’s really thinking about stealing a cookie?”
“I do understand the concept,” Virgil said. “A bad guy goes into a gas station to buy a candy bar, but he’s looking at the cash register and counting the clerks.”
“That’s right,” O’Hara said. “Like that. I got that feeling about this man. That he was not interested in the books, that he was up to something else. I would occasionally see it with a student who was planning to steal a book. I asked this man if I could help him, but he said no, and a couple of minutes later I saw him heading out the door. Then, a week later, I saw him near the carrels again. Have you been up there?”
“Yes.”
“You know how the carrels are lined up along that outer wall? He was walking along there, slowly. I got the feeling he was up to something again. Both times, he was right by Dr. Quill’s carrel.”
O’Hara said the man was white, of medium height, balding but with reddish brown hair pulled back in a short, brushy ponytail. “He wasn’t fat, but I’d say he was a little porky. He had a porky face. A red face, like a drinker. Small eyes. He was a smoker, I could smell it on him. When he saw me the second time, he sped up and walked away and went down the stairs. I think he recognized me from the first time and wanted to get out of there.”
“Miz O’Hara, thank you. This could be important. I will come by to interview you again. I’d like to record this.”
“I’m afraid I won’t be here for a while. I’m leaving in a few minutes for Eau Claire. Mother was registered ahead of time with the county medical examiner, so the body was taken directly to the funeral home and is being transferred to Eau Claire this afternoon for burial. I have to be there to make arrangements.”
“Okay. You said this was last winter when you saw him?”
“Or early spring—not later than March. I wasn’t focused on it at the time. I will think about it some more to see if I can recall exactly when it was.”
“Call me as soon as you get back from Eau Claire.”
“I will.”
* * *
—
“Something good?” Shrake asked.
“Could be,” Virgil said. He slipped a couple of French fries off Shrake’s plate. “Somebody seen hanging around Quill’s carrel up at the library. But quite a while ago. Don’t know if it’s connected. Anyway, let’s go talk to McDonald.”
* * *
—
McDonald lived in a tree-shaded rambler in St. Louis Park, which was good because the day was both hot and humid. They’d driven over in their separate vehicles, left them at the curb, and as they walked up the driveway, Shrake asked, “If she’s here, which I doubt, you wanna go in hard?”
“Semi-hard,” Virgil said.
“Last time I heard that phrase, I was in bed with a woman from the county recorder’s office,” Shrake said.
“I didn’t want to hear about Trane sex, and I don’t want to hear about county recorder sex,” Virgil said. “Push the fuckin’ doorbell.”
People were rarely home when the cops pushed their bells for the very good reason that they were at work, unless they were the kind that didn’t work. McDonald, as it turned out, did work, but as a nurse on the three-to-eleven shift at the Hennepin County Medical Center.
She came to the door in her white nurse’s uniform, wrinkles of concern across her otherwise smooth forehead. She was a bit overweight, with a round face, dark hair cut short, and dark brown eyes. Virgil held up his ID, and said, “Mrs. McDonald, we’re agents of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and we’re investigating the death of your husband, Frank. We have a few questions for you.”
She looked from Virgil to Shrake and then back to Virgil. “But . . . that’s all over with. Frank died almost a year ago.”
“It’s not quite over with,” Virgil said. “May we come in?”
“Well . . . Could you wait here for a couple of moments while I make a phone call?”
Shrake said, “Don’t run away, Ruth. Make your call.”
“I’m not going to . . . Don’t be stupid.”
She closed the door, and Virgil said to Shrake, “Yeah, don’t be stupid.”
“Maybe I ought to watch the back door,” Shrake said. Virgil gave him a look, and Shrake said, “Okay, maybe not.”
Virgil said, “I’m going to stand in the shade.”
“Good idea.”
They were standing in the shade of McDonald’s dwarf maple when a St. Louis Park cop car slid to the curb behind Virgil’s Tahoe.
Shrake: “She called a fuckin’ cop on us. Can you believe that?”
“On you,” Virgil said. “Nobody calls the cops on me because I’m not that kind of guy.”
The cop got out of his car, and Virgil walked over to him, holding his ID out in front of him.
“BCA. Did McDonald call you?”
The cop looked at Virgil’s ID, then looked at Shrake, and asked Virgil, “Who’s the mook?”
Shrake said, “Hey, I thought that was you. Still dating fourteen-year-olds?”
“She was twenty-three,” the cop said. “What I didn’t know was, she wasn’t entirely divorced.”
“So you guys know each other and we’re good?” Virgil asked.
The cop waved at him. “Yeah, you’re good. I’ll call in and tell them to cancel the SWAT team.”
Before he did, the cop knocked on McDonald’s door, and, when she opened it, he told her that Virgil and Shrake were legit. “Catch you later,” he said to Shrake.
When the cop was back in his car, Virgil said, “You never introduced
us.”
“Couldn’t remember his name, but he claims he’s a nine handicap,” Shrake said. He showed his overly white teeth to McDonald. “We need to talk. Right now.”
* * *
—
They sat in the living room, McDonald perched on a couch, Shrake in a La-Z-Boy, Virgil sitting on a kitchen chair. McDonald said, “Everything is settled, the estate—”
“We’re looking at a murder—the murder of Professor Quill, whom you know, at the University of Minnesota, almost three weeks ago, now. That murder has some ties back to the death of your husband,” Virgil told her.
“What!”
“When we looked at your husband’s death,” Shrake said, stopping momentarily to probe his teeth with a silver toothpick, which had both McDonald and Virgil leaning toward him, waiting, “we discovered some . . . unusual aspects . . . So, Mrs. McDonald, did you murder your husband?”
“What!”
“Did you—”
“No! Are you crazy? I loved Frank! I’m a nurse, I’d never . . .”
Virgil, quiet and gentle: “Did you help him with his pain pills?”
“Of course. Every four hours. I’m very professional . . .”
“Yeah, right,” Shrake said. “Then how come there were none of your fingerprints on the bottle? It’s like it was wiped clean before your husband supposedly picked it up.”
She started to blubber, then stood up, her arms straight down at her sides, and said, “I’m calling my lawyer.”
“Jones or Hardy?” Virgil asked.
“Mr. Jones. You two get out of here. Go back out. I want to talk to Mr. Jones in private.”
“Don’t run away,” Shrake said, grinning at her, “’cause we’ll getcha.”
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