“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, thenclosed 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.”
