Bloody Genius

by John Sandford

  “That little asshole has a Faraday bag,” Virgil said. “He used it on Quill’s telephone.”

  “That’s what I think,” Trane said.

  Knox: “I’m buying it, but I don’t think we’re going to find a judge who’ll issue us a search warrant on the basis of Krause playing Clue and the coincidence of those names.”

  “Not really a coincidence,” Virgil said. “He knew the Green name, and he played on that with the others.”

  “Do you think we could get a warrant?” Knox asked.

  “Maybe with the right judge.”

  “Not here in Hennepin. Maybe from one of those good ol’ boys down in Hogwash Corners, but not here,” Knox said. “Maggie, what do you think?”

  “I think you’re right,” she told Knox. “We’re not there yet, on a warrant. I’ve talked to Megan Quill a couple of times. She felt bad about her father, even if they had a rough relationship. I know for sure she’s freaked out about Renborne. I think we talk to her. I think we can set a trap, if she’ll cooperate. Bug her room. Get Krause in there . . .”

  “Could work,” Knox said.

  “Gotta be careful,” Virgil said. “If he reacted like he did with Barth Quill, he could whack her with something before we could get in the room.”

  “We also have to be ready for an adamant and detailed denial of why he couldn’t have done it,” Knox said. “Get that on tape and it’d get a lot tougher in court later on; the jury would hear nothing but a denial.”

  “Let’s work through all of that, do some brainstorming,” Trane said. “Maybe we don’t have to get Megan involved. If we do, we’ll have to be careful.”

  “All we need is enough to get a warrant,” Virgil said. “I’ll bet you a zillion dollars that he’s still got that computer. I’ll bet he’s hotter for that laptop than he is for Megan Quill.”

  Knox asked, “Which one of you is going to talk to Quill?”

  Trane and Virgil glanced at each other and simultaneously said, “Both of us.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Virgil and Trane drove over to Megan Quill’s apartment, but she wasn’t there. Virgil called her a half dozen times, walking up and down the sidewalk outside her apartment. Each time, the phone went to voice mail. But, in Virgil’s experience, people Quill’s age tended to walk around with their cell phone in their hands, and his persistence eventually paid off. On the sixth call, she answered, with a weak, tremulous, “Who is this?”

  “Virgil Flowers. We need to talk to you. It’s pretty urgent. Where are you?”

  “Student center. What do you want to talk to me about?”

  “Best to do it face-to-face,” Virgil said. “We’re at your apartment. Do you want us to come over there or do you want to come here?”

  “I’m with a girlfriend.”

  “This talk has to be a private. So, whatever you think, but it has to be private.”

  After a moment, she said, “I’ll walk home. It’s five to ten minutes.”

  “We could pick you up.”

  “No, I’ll walk.”

  She took longer than five to ten, long enough that Virgil started to worry, but Trane said, “Girls that age don’t always have a tight grip on the passage of time. Give her a few more minutes.”

  And, a few minutes later, they saw her coming down the sidewalk, head down, hair loose and frizzy, carrying a backpack by a single strap over her shoulder.

  Virgil said, “She looks like she’s been hit hard.”

  Trane agreed. “She has been. Death of a lover, first dead man she’s ever seen, and she found him. She’ll remember this all of her days. She’ll be sad all of her days.”

  * * *

  —

  When Quill came up, she raised her head and looked at them, and asked, “Is somebody else dead?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Virgil said.

  Trane said, “Why don’t we go up and talk in your room . . . Where it’s cool.”

  In Quill’s room, Virgil and Trane took the two kitchen table chairs, and Quill perched on the corner of the bed, which she hadn’t folded back into a couch that morning. Quill put her backpack aside, and said, “What’s up?”

  Trane looked at Virgil, who said, “Megan, we think we figured out who may have killed your father.”

  She looked from Virgil to Trane and back to Virgil, and said, “Jerry.”

  Trane: “Why would you say that?”

  ‘I’m triangulating. Dad’s dead, Brett’s dead, you’re talking to me about figuring it out. The only other one you and I know who knew Dad and Brett is Jerry. Why do you think Jerry did it? Do you think he killed Brett, too?”

  “We think it’s a real possibility,” Virgil said.

  “Then it’s my fault, isn’t it?” She dropped her head again and looked down at the floor between her legs. “I led him on with all that pussy thing, letting him look but not touch, and sleeping with his best friend. He got back at me by killing my dad and his friend.”

  Trane said, “No. That’s an amazing thought, but that’s not it. We think he went to your father’s library carrel at midnight and, purely by accident, bumped into your father.”

  Now Quill looked up with a sudden light in her eye. “That fuckin’ computer . . .”

  Virgil said, “Yes. We think he went there to steal the computer. One of the best gaming computers you could hope to get, and he ran into your father who was there for another reason. There may have been some pushing. And the woman who was there with your dad thought she heard him say something about calling the police. Jerry may have had the laptop in his hand and struck him with it.”

  Now Quill straightened, and said, “I totally believe that. Totally. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.”

  Virgil and Trane laid out the other thoughts they had that pointed at Krause, and Quill confirmed that they’d been in her father’s house several times when he was out of town. “We joked about stealing stuff that he wouldn’t miss, but Brett wouldn’t actually let us do that. We watched movies on Netflix. Dad left his Z8 in the garage, and we talked about driving around like Brett and me once saw in some old movie.”

  “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Trane said, “Only, I think it was a Ferrari.”

  “That’s the one,” Quill said.

  “You went in while he was gone . . . Did you ever run into a housekeeper or anyone?” It would be nice, Virgil thought, if a housekeeper had seen Krause.

  “No, but Jen—she’s the housekeeper—only comes in the mornings. We knew that. Brett and I would go up and fuck on Dad’s bed. We made Jerry stay outside the bedroom but told him he could listen. We were such assholes.”

  Trane made the pitch. “We want you to help catch Jerry. We’re not there yet.”

  She explained that the information they had wasn’t enough for a search warrant and that the best confirming evidence they could possibly find would be the laptop. “We thought that if we could get Jerry up here—”

  “He’s coming over this afternoon,” Quill said.

  “Okay. We wanted to bring some technical people over here to put in some listening and recording equipment.”

  “Bug the apartment?”

  “Yes. We’ll be down the hall, in the next apartment—that’s a fellow named Dick, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “We’d want you to ask Jerry if he had anything to do with Brett’s death.”

  “He was down in Faribault.”

  “Somebody, we don’t know who, walked up to Brett’s room before six in the morning. Could have been Brett, but we think Brett may have been unconscious by then. We think Brett may have had a fairly late night, went back to his apartment with some heroin, shot up. We think he was probably asleep, dreaming, when Jerry arrived. He may even have told Jerry what he was planning to do.”

 
“They did talk about it,” Quill said.

  “Faribault’s less than an hour from here,” Virgil said. “Jerry would have had access to his mother’s car. He could have left there at five o’clock before she got up and been back before seven.”

  “What exactly would I say to him? Jerry. That’s not something you’d blurt out: ‘Did you kill Brett?’”

  “I don’t know, maybe you could,” Virgil said. “What time is he coming over?”

  “I told him I’m going home to White Bear tonight. We were going to go out for a pizza about five o’clock. My mom’s picking me up right after the rush hour, probably about six.”

  “You don’t have a car here?”

  “No, I don’t need one. I’m trying to save money. Tuition is forty thousand dollars a year, and that comes out of my trust fund. I get a scholarship, which saves some, but after rent and everything else there’s not a lot left. I’d like to transfer to the U . . . Anyway, what should I say to Jerry? Exactly.”

  “We’re coming to that,” Trane said. “We wanted to get your okay for doing this. I’ll suggest a few things, we’ll rehearse. If we’re going to do this, we need to get the technical people over here.”

  Quill nodded. She seemed to be coming alive. “I’ll do it. Call them.”

  * * *

  —

  They had time to rehearse and set up the recording equipment and talk to Dick, the guy down the hall, who agreed, eventually, to go away between four and seven o’clock, not that he wanted to.

  “I’d just watch,” he told Virgil.

  “Can’t have outside witnesses,” Virgil said. “All the local police forces would be very, very grateful if you’d go watch a movie or go on a date or something. I’ll give you twenty bucks out of my own pocket to get a pizza.”

  Dick took the twenty, but grumbled about it.

  * * *

  —

  At four forty-five, Virgil, Trane, and the tech services guy, whose name was Barry, were all in Dick’s room listening to Quill playing a Chainsmokers album. Barry said “She’s gotta turn that down.”

  “We told her, she’ll kill it when Krause gets here,” Virgil said. “Did you tell her to turn off her phone?”

  “Yeah. That’s all we’d need, a girlfriend call in the middle of a confession.”

  “She’s played that goldarn song about thirty times since we started listening,” Barry said.

  Trane: “‘Until You Were Gone,’ with Emily Warren . . . Megan’s boyfriend was killed a couple days ago.”

  “That song ain’t gonna fix her head,” the tech said.

  “We don’t know that,” Trane said. “Anyway, it’s nice. I think it’s nice.”

  “Nice the first eight or ten times.”

  * * *

  —

  Krause had told Quill that he’d come get her at five o’clock. Virgil had talked to the phone tech guy at the BCA, had given him Krause’s phone number, and they knew he was running late: his phone was still on the other side of the St. Thomas campus. They didn’t want Krause out of the house with Quill, so they decided that Quill would order a pizza and have it show up about the same time Krause did. At ten after five, the pizza delivery truck showed up, but Krause was still on campus.

  The phone tech called a minute later, and said, “Okay, he’s headed your way.”

  Virgil had placed himself at the corner of Dick’s only window, where he could watch the sidewalk, and at five-twenty he saw Krause hurrying toward the house.

  Trane called Quill, and said, “He’s here,” and she asked, “You okay?”

  “Actually, I’m fine,” she said. “I’m putting the pizza in the microwave.”

  They heard the door downstairs bang shut when Krause came in, his footsteps on the stairs, and then the quick rap when he knocked on Quill’s door.

  She let him in, and said, “I can’t go out. I’m sorry, I’m all fucked up. I ordered a pizza, I thought we could sit around and talk until Mom gets here.” The volume of the music dropped to nothing.

  “Okay with me,” Krause said.

  Trane: “So far, so good.”

  “We’re ten seconds in,” Virgil said.

  “I can’t believe it about Brett,” Quill said, her voice wavering, climbing a half octave. “I still can’t believe it.”

  Trane: “She’s crying.”

  The tech: “Heck, she’s good at this.”

  Virgil: “Shh. Shut up, everybody.”

  Krause said, “Nobody can believe it. I was talking to some guys today: nobody can believe he was involved with heroin. That’s not . . . That’s not what we do here.”

  There was a ding in the background, and Quill said, “I got hungry, the pizza was cold, so I stuck it in the microwave. Let me get it.”

  “Great. What’re you doing with your mom?”

  “Nothing. I wanted to get away from campus for a couple of days. Hide out in White Bear. I’m going to meet a girlfriend up at the mall, I need some shoes and shit.”

  * * *

  —

  There were dishes banging around for a moment, the scrape of silverware, then Krause said, “You got that nightgown on. You got on anything underneath it?”

  Five seconds later, he said; “Oh. My. God. C’mon, give me another shot. Oh. My. God.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil: “Holy shit, she’s taken off her clothes. She did that when I first talked to her; she was flashing Brett and Jerry.”

  * * *

  —

  Jerry: “You gonna let me touch?”

  “Fuck no. That hasn’t changed,” Quill said. “Not yet anyway. I mean, Brett . . .” And now she sobbed.

  More dishes, and, a moment later, Jerry said, “Good. Hot. What are the green things?”

  “Spinach.”

  “Cool.”

  “Jerry, I need to ask you something . . .”

  * * *

  —

  “Here we go,” Virgil said.

  * * *

  —

  “You didn’t . . . I mean, don’t take this wrong, okay? . . . You didn’t have anything to do with . . . Dad?”

  “What!”

  “You know, that computer up there. I was thinking about it. It’s, like, a hot gaming computer . . .”

  Long silence.

  * * *

  —

  Then, “Hey, fuck you, Megan! You think I . . . What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know. Those cops were over here this morning asking me if I knew what Dad was doing with the laptop, they said it was really, really superhot and they wondered what he was running on it. After they left, I thought about it, and I wondered . . . I mean, what if it wasn’t what he was running, what if it was just the laptop itself?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sakes, Megan. I wouldn’t hurt . . . Hey! If you think I killed your old man . . .” Krause was shouting.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Do you think I killed Brett? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “No, no, I didn’t think that, Jerry. Brett did it to himself. But I was wondering, you know? I remember when Dad bought that laptop, and you couldn’t believe it, looking at the box and everything. Listen, forget I said it.”

  “I can’t forget it. How can I? Fuck you and your pussy. And you can take this fuckin’ pizza and stick it up your ass. I’m outta here.”

  “Jerry,” Quill wailed. “C’mon, I didn’t mean . . .”

  The door slammed, and then they heard Krause banging down the stairs and out. Virgil stepped to the window and saw him stomping down the sidewalk, shoulders hunched. He looked back once, his face either angry or maybe frightened, then turned away and disappeared under the canopies of street-side maples.

  Barry said, “Well, that didn’t wo
rk out as well as it might have.”

  * * *

  —

  “Let’s go talk with Megan,” Trane said.

  “Krause could come back,” Virgil said. “I still think he’s the guy and I don’t want him to know this was a setup. Let me make sure we’re still tracking the phone so that if he turns back, we’ll get a call.”

  Virgil made the call to the BCA tech and then they went down to Quill’s apartment and found her changed into jeans and a light pullover blouse. When she let them in, she walked away to the table, picked up a slice, and said, “Now I know for sure.”

  Trane: “Know what?”

  “Jerry did it. Killed Dad. And probably Brett. I just . . .” She ran out of words.

  Virgil: “How do you know?”

  She swallowed pizza, and said, “I guess you had to be here. When I popped the question, he was quiet for a long time, and I could see him thinking about what to say. But I could see it on his face: he did it. I’ve known him for a long time and I could see it.”

  “That’s probably not going to work in court,” Trane said.

  Barry, the tech, was stripping microphones from the apartment, then packed up the receiver and checked out. Quill said, “You had so many mics here, we could have made a record.”

  “Could have. Didn’t,” he said with a smile. “But don’t give up. We can try again if we can get him back here.”

  “I could try to fuck him into saying it,” Quill suggested.

  “No, no,” Trane said. “You saying that could probably get me thrown out of the police department. ‘Yeah, Trane got a teenager to fuck the suspect into a confession.’ Jesus. I get goose bumps thinking about it.”

  There were footsteps coming up the stairs as the tech was going down, and they heard him say, “Excuse me,” and Quill looked out the door, and said, “Hi, Mom.”