Virgil was puzzled. “Yeah?”
Frankie: “They’re all names from the game of Clue. Green. White. Peacock. I’m pretty sure there’s a Mr. Black who’s the murdered guy. Wait, I’ve got Clue somewhere in the closet.”
“I’ve never played it,” Virgil said. She went to get the game, and Virgil called after her, “Megan Quill had Clue in her closet.”
She came back, said, “We’re missing some pieces, but here’s the whole thing about ‘Mr. Peacock killed him with a candlestick in the library.’ You know that bit?”
“I’ve heard something like that.”
She told him about the game, showed him the pieces, the clues, the rooms...
“So Mrs. Green killed Dr. Quill in the library with the computer.”
Virgil lay back on the couch and closed his eyes. “Yeah. But it wasn’t Mrs. Green.” Then, after a moment, he said, “I gotta go online and look at Wikipedia. Back in a minute.”
In a minute, he was back. “There’s nobody named Black in the American version. Clue was originally called Cluedo and was invented by an English guy. The victim was named Black, but in the American version that was changed to Mr. Boddy.”
“I knew about Boddy,” Frankie said. “I thought that was pretty clever.Not.”
“All those clues,” Virgil said. “From an Anglophile game freak who was dragging us all over the goddamn Cities with fake clues. From a freakin’ board game.”
—
Virgil called Trane. She answered with, “Flowers, you figured it out?”
“Yeah, we did, me and Frankie—mostly Frankie. I know who killed Quill and probably Brett Renborne.”
Trane crunched on something, maybe an apple. She paused. “Okay. Well, don’t keep me waiting. Who was it?”
“Jerry Krause. Who, twenty-four hours ago, was crying his lyin’ eyes out about his dead buddy Brett.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Virgil met with Trane and Lieutenant Carl Knox in Knox’s office the next morning so Virgil could lay out the argument for Knox. “It’s gonna sound weird. Itisweird. This whole case is weird,” Virgil said.
He and Frankie had diagrammed the arguments on a yellow legal pad the night before with a variety of arrows demonstrating how one thought led to another and eventually to the conclusion about Jerry Krause. Knox took in the mess of notes—annotations in the margins, inserts, underlines, yet more arrows—and said, “Tell me one thing to start with. Why’d he do it? This Krause kid.”
“It’s so basic that we didn’t see it. He simply wanted the computer,” Virgil said. “He didn’t want anything in the computer. He didn’t want data or software or any of that. It had nothing to do with the feud between Cultural Science and the medical guys. He wanted the fuckin’ computer because it was the fastest thing he’d ever seen and he’s a crazy gamer. He’s obsessed with games. I actually saw him slap his Mac laptop because it was too slow.Slapped it. Called it a piece of shit. I’d bet my left nut that he’s still got Quill’s machine.”
“With twins on the way, you probably don’t need your left nut anymore, so that’s not much of a bet,” Trane said.
Knox waved her off. “Stay focused. What are all those scribbled notes?”
“We kept adding things that seemed relevant, stuff that we knew. First of all, from something she said, I’m almost certain that Megan Quill took her friends over to her father’s house at one time or another. We can talk to Megan about that. Both Renborne and Krause knew him, they both disliked him, so there was some contact. I’d be willing to bet that’s where Krause found out about the laptop in the library. Quill had three cars. He had a fob for each of them, with lots of keys on them—for his house, his lab, his various offices and the carrel, and probably for the library’s outer doors. I wouldn’t be surprised that if we looked at all three, we’d find that one of them is missing the library keys. Because Krause was inside the house, knew what they were, and he took them.”
“How would he know which keys were which?”
Virgil shrugged. “I don’t know. But if you’re smart, you could find out. Like, if Quill had two similar keys and three different ones on each fob, then the two similar keys would be for the library.”
“That’s thin,” Trane said.
“I know, but if I could figure it out, I think Krause could, too. I’d be interested to know if Megan had a key to her father’s house and knew the security code. If she did, that would mean that she and her friends could have been in the house when Quill wasn’t. Could have looked around.”
Trane said, “I’ve been talking to the Ramsey medical examiner.They say Renborne’s death is suspicious. The cause of death is definitely an overdose. The manner of death they’re going to list as undetermined—possibly accident, suicide, or homicide. The question is, why would Krause have killed him?”
“Because Renborne figured it out,” Virgil said.
