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!”
