Bloody Genius

by John Sandford

  “It’s complicated,” Trane said. She tipped her head toward Quill. “This young lady is the daughter of Dr. Quill, the professor who was murdered at the university a couple of weeks ago. She found the body of a friend of hers. She thinks it might be an overdose. And it might be . . . A deliberate overdose.”

  “What makes you think it was an overdose, Miz Quill?” Marshall asked.

  “I knew he was messing around with heroin . . . And there’s a syringe on the floor . . .”

  “Ah. Well, let’s go take a look.”

  Bryan said, “Let’s go take a careful look. It could be a crime scene.”

  Marshall popped open her briefcase and took out a pack of plastic booties, handed pairs to Bryan, Trane, and Virgil, took a pair for herself. They filed up the stairs, and Bryan asked one of the cops to stay with Quill. “You don’t want to go in there anymore anyway,” Bryan told her.

  She hugged herself and shook her head, said, “No.”

  Marshall and the three cops put on their booties and went into Renborne’s room. Marshall scanned the body, bent over to look at Renborne’s arms, said, “Huh.” She read the message on the dead man’s stomach, scanned the body again, spent some time looking at the area behind Renborne’s left knee, stood up, and said, “Give me a minute.”

  She went to the door, stuck her head out, and called to Quill, who was waiting down the hallway. “Do you know if your friend was left- or right-handed?”

  Quill called back, “Right-handed, I think. Yeah, right-handed.”

  “Thanks.”

  Marshall stepped back into the room, put her hands on her hips, gazing at the body, then turned to Bryan, and said, “You need to be careful here, Rog. He has what looks like a regular injection site behind his left knee, including a fresh one. He has another fresh one on the inside of his right elbow. But only one there, no signs of more on either arm.”

  “Why would he change regular injection sites?” Trane asked.

  Marshall said, “That happens. Can’t tell what junkies are going to do, especially if they’re already high when they do that second hit. But, it’s a little unusual to inject into your dominant arm. Most junkies inject into their nondominant one. Also, that injection in the left leg would be typical of a right-handed guy using that hand to hold the syringe. To inject his right arm, he would have had to use his left hand.”

  She went back to the door and called out to Quill. “Did your friend wear a lot of short-sleeved shirts?”

  Quill called back, “Yes. All the time.”

  Marshall turned to Bryan, and said, “Which makes it even less likely that he’d inject in his arm, where it’d be visible. So, we gotta let the docs take a look at this. But I’m tentatively calling the manner of death undetermined. From the writing on his stomach, it was not an accident. Could be suicide, but it also could be that somebody murdered him. Gave him a hot shot while he was sleeping off the first injection. We’ll have to wait for the autopsy to be sure, but I think the cause of death is clear enough.”

  Virgil said, “We need to talk with Megan.”

  Bryan: “I’m with you.” Trane nodded, and Bryan added, “I’m bringing in Crime Scene.”

  * * *

  —

  Renborne had the only rented room in the house. The rest of it was occupied by the owner, an older woman, who agreed to let them use a bedroom down the hall from Renborne’s to interview Quill.

  As they took her in, she said, “I’ve never seen a dead person before. Not a real one. When my dad was killed, his wife had him cremated, so there was nothing at the funeral except this vase. But I knew Brett was dead when I went in and saw him.”

  “Did you touch the body?” Bryan asked. “We need to know if we wind up doing DNA tests.”

  She jerked her head up and down, sobbed again, caught herself, and said, “I touched his shoulder, his shirt. I kinda poked him. He was like wood. I knew he was dead.”

  “All right.”

  Virgil said, “Give me a minute. I need to look at something.”

  While Bryan was asking Quill about her time line that day—what she’d done, where she’d gone, who she’d seen, and when—Virgil left and walked down to the room where Marshall and the cop were waiting for a Crime Scene crew.

  “I need to look at something: his desk.”

  He got a single bootie from Marshall, scanned the room carefully, then looked at the top of the desk, which held Renborne’s laptop, a stack of spiral notebooks—all used—and a tall, gray marmalade jar that looked old, possibly a real antique, which held a variety of pens and pencils. He put the bootie on his right hand and used it to open the desk drawers. He looked inside, then closed the drawers, stepped back to the door, gave Marshall the bootie, and walked back to the bedroom where Quill was still talking about what she did that day.

  When she finished, Virgil asked, “Where’s your friend Jerry?”

  “He went home to Faribault last night.”

  Byran: “Who’s Jerry?”

  Quill said, “Jerry Krause. He’s a friend. He and another guy—Butch-something—went down to Faribault last night.”

  “Does he go down there a lot?” Virgil asked.

  “When he starts running low on cash. He gets an allowance from his dad and sometimes he spends it too fast,” Quill said. “His parents are divorced, and he goes down when he runs out of clothes and washes them all at his mom’s house. She usually slips him some money. He’s probably down there every three weeks or month.”

  Trane asked, “Was Brett unhappy about something? Depressed?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I noticed. And I think I would have noticed. I didn’t want him fuckin’ around with those drugs, I kept telling him that. He was a happy guy, really. If he overdosed, it was an accident.”

  “What about the message?” Bryan asked.

  She shook her head again. “What message?”

  “You didn’t see the message?” Trane asked.

  “No, no note. There’s nothing.”

  Virgil: “There’s a message written on his stomach.” He turned to Trane and Bryan. “I’m pretty sure you guys spotted this detail, but the note was written so it could read right side up. But from his perspective, he’d have had to have written it upside down and backwards. Upside down and backwards, and he was stoned.”

  “I wondered about that,” Trane said, and Bryan said, “Yeah.”

  “I looked around the room,” Virgil said. “Unless there are some Sharpies under the bed, where I couldn’t see them, or in the closet, there aren’t any others. Only the one on the floor.”

  Bryan said, “That worries me.”

  Quill: “Somebody murdered him?”

  “We have to think about it,” Bryan said. “And the note . . . Let me ask you this: how well did Brett know your father?”

  “I mean, he was with us a couple of times when we went over there. Dad didn’t like him because he thought Brett was a slacker. And Brett couldn’t help himself, he’d get sarcastic. But not mean sarcastic. He’d sort of tweak Dad. One time, he was looking around the music room—the Steinway and the stereos and all—and he said something like, ‘Man, the shit you can get when you inherit money.’ Dad got pissed, went on about hard work and millennials not knowing hard work if it bit them on the ass.”

  Bryan: “Do you think Brett could have killed him? Even if it was, you know, by accident?”

  Quill: “My father wasn’t killed by accident . . .”

  “You know what he means,” Trane said. “They don’t like each other. They run into each other up there in the library. Your father thinks Brett is stealing something, like his computer, and Brett hits him with it. Doesn’t mean to kill him, but there’s a struggle.”

  “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 . . .”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  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 . . .

  * * *