“You’re a cop,” she said. “I got your card.”
“Yeah, but... Where are you?”
“In Brett’s room.”
“Do you have an address?”
He heard running footsteps, then heard her: “What’s the address? What’s the fuckin’ address here? Hey, you...”
There was more shouting in the distance, and then she came back with a St. Paul address not far from the University of St. Thomas.
“Stay where are, don’t touch a thing. And leave the room,” Virgil said. “I’ll call the St. Paul cops, they should be there in five minutes. I’ll be there in ten. Stay right there.”
“It looks like he... I think he OD’d. There’s a syringe on the floor. He’s all white-and-gray-looking.”
“What—”
“Heroin. Sometimes he did heroin. He said it made him dreamy.” She started to sob.
“Stay there,” Virgil repeated.
“Jesus Christ, he’s really dead!” she screamed.
Virgil again told her to leave the room, and she did, and he said, “Go someplace and sit down with your back against the wall. You don’t want to faint and hurt yourself. Don’t let anybody go in the room. Sit, and the cops will be there in a couple.”
He clicked off, dialed 911, identified himself, explained the situation, gave the operator the address Megan Quill was calling from. “I’ll be there myself in a few minutes. Tell the responding guys that this could be part of another murder investigation and to be careful with the scene. Tell them to freeze it, nothing more, and call Ryan at St. Paul Homicide.”
When he got off the call to 911, he called Trane. “Megan Quill found her friend dead about two minutes ago,” he said. “She thinks it might be an overdose. St. Paul cops are on the way. I’m going over.”
“Give me an address. I’m sitting in my car at the office. I’ll be right behind you.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
As Virgil walked out of the elevator, he almost ran over Harry, who was headed for the bar.
Harry said, “You finally get a clue? You look like it.”
“Maybe,” Virgil said. “Can’t talk.”
“It’s a kid, isn’t it?” Harry called after him, as he went out the door.
A dead kid, Virgil thought, as he jogged out to his truck.
—
From the University of Minnesota to St. Thomas normally would have been a ten-minute run, but Virgil had grille lights and a siren and he punched them up and made it in eight. He found two St. Paul cop cars at the curb outside an old, decrepit house.
Virgil talked to the first cop he came to, who said another cop was on the second-floor landing of the house with Megan Quill. “We stuck our head inside the room to see if the victim could be resuscitated, but he appears to have been dead for a while.”
“Okay, I’m going up,” Virgil said.
The cop touched his arm. “We didn’t mess with the body, but we looked at it to make sure he was cold and not breathing. Check his stomach.”
“What?”
“Check his stomach.”
