“I can do that.”
Trane called two hours later. “Did you have anything to do with the crowd of TV assholes that turned up on my lawn an hour ago?”
“Mmm, maybe.”
“We had a nice talk,” she said. “Virgil, thank you. I’d like to find a more substantial way to thank you.”
“I’m open to that as long as it doesn’t involve sex,” Virgil said. “I’m already committed.”
“You know, you’re not always as funny as you think you are,” Trane said.
Virgil said, “Okay. When I get my ass in trouble down south, I may give you a ring. Get some cow manure on your Louboutins.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” she said.
* * *
—
Krause would get a public defender, who eventually suggested, after several long interviews, that his client would plead guilty to a second degree murder charge in the death of Quill. He said that Krause denied killing Brett Renborne and had an excellent alibi: he’d been in Faribault without a car.
Krause, he said, had been misunderstood by Megan Quill: he’d never told her that he’d killed Renborne, she had imagined it in her fear. The kidnapping, he said, had essentially been a domestic fight between friends.
None of it would wash, Trane told Virgil in a phone call, but he might evade doing a full thirty years in prison, without parole, the minimum sentence for a first degree murder charge in Minnesota. “If the state takes the second degree plea and kidnapping, served concurrently, he could get thirty years, but without doing the mandatory full term of a first degree conviction. He could be out in twenty or so.”
“What’s the county attorney thinking?”
“I think they’re thinking they’ll drag along for a while. After the press gets back to worrying about movie stars and their love lives, they’ll try to sneak through the deal. His public defender is a good one: he knows every rope there is.”
“Well, at least the asshole got shot and stabbed in the eye,” Virgil said.
“There you are, brother.”
* * *
—
Katherine Green called, and asked Virgil if he thought Trane might participate in a longitudinal study of policewomen who have shot criminal suspects. Virgil said he had no idea. “Give her a call. Who knows? Could be interesting.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Green said. “Interesting.”
* * *
—
Virgil made it out of Minneapolis late Sunday night, arriving at the farm at eleven o’clock. Sam got out of bed to meet him, and Virgil and Sam and Frankie had warm rhubarb pie and vanilla ice cream in the kitchen.
When Sam was back in bed, and Virgil’s clothes were in the wash, he and Frankie went up to the bedroom. They lay awake in the dark for a while, talking about the case, and then Frankie said, “So, I needed to get a yellow highlighter pen. I couldn’t find one downstairs, but you’ve always got a bunch of them. I stuck my nose in your desk—honest, I was looking for a highlighter—and I found the novel.”
Virgil didn’t know exactly what to say. “An experiment,” he said finally. “I don’t know what I’m doing yet. I’m trying some things out.”
“It’s good,” she said. “I’m not lying. It pulled me right in. Virgil, you’ve got to run with this. You’ve got to.”
“You think so?”
She rolled over so she was hovering over his face. “It could be a whole new chapter, sweetie.”
He nodded in the dark. “Okay, then. That’s what I’ll do, Frank. I’ll run with it.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of twenty-eight Prey novels, most recently Twisted Prey; four Kidd novels, eleven Virgil Flowers novels, and six other books, including three YA novels coauthored with his wife, Michele Cook.
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Bloody Genius Page 33