A rich guy for sure. Everything was notably tidy except the home office, which had the look of a working space, with papers and books and journals and pens and transparent highlighters spread around all the flat surfaces. Everything else in the house had the feel of professional maintenance: a maid, at least, and possibly a gardener.
Virgil worked his way slowly through the entire house with the exception of the cellar and the attic, which he checked briefly and then dismissed. Again, he couldn’t imagine how either might factor in a murder that had taken place a mile away. He was looking for words—in letters, texts, or printouts—or personal possessions that weren’t Quill’s. Something that would suggest or reveal an inimical relationship.
The bed was neatly made, king-sized and covered with a huge old shoofly quilt. He carefully peeled it back until the bottom sheet was exposed, then went over the quilt looking for more dark pubic hairs. And found none.
He saved the office for last. The centerpiece was an ancient oak desk, fully eight feet long and four feet across, the old wood polished to a high sheen, with ranks of drawers on both sides of the kneehole. The desk had been carefully updated with a keyboard where there’d once been a center drawer, with a rank of electric sockets installed along the back edge of the desktop. There was an empty spot there where a computer had been, its Canon printer still sitting to one side, its computer hookup cable curled next to it. Trane had taken the computer to research emails.
A bookshelf was stacked with academic journals, several medical books, and more academic detritus, all of it printed, none of it annotated, nothing that would help with a murder. There was another stereo, with two bookshelf speakers. Virgil noticed an LED light on a CD player, opened it, and found an unmarked disc sitting in the tray. He took it out: no markings whatever. He put it back, pressed the play button, and a minute later an unfamiliar singer pushed the uncomplicated lyrics of “Home on the Range” through his nose through the speakers.
He turned the CD player off with an involuntary shudder. He sorta lived on the range, but that didn’t mean the song didn’t suck.
The bookshelves also contained a collection of antique wooden boxes, and inside them he found important but routine papers—a checkbook, check stubs from his university paycheck, investment reports from U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo, tax records, insurance policies, titles to automobiles, a stack of last year’s Christmas cards. Hespent a half hour going through the papers and journals on the desk and on two side filing cabinets, looking for anything handwritten, anything out of place. He found nothing that looked important.
—
Virgil was lying under the desk, in the kneehole, when Trane asked, unexpectedly, “What are you doing?”
Virgil, startled, jerked half upright and banged his head against the bottom of the keyboard drawer. He dropped back on his elbows and saw Trane’s shoes and cuffs of her pants. “Ouch. Jesus Christ, give me a little warning, will you?”
“Sorry. What are you doing?” She stooped and peered under the desk.
“My grandpa had a desk like this. Smaller, but old like this one, with a million drawers,” Virgil said. He was digging around in a narrow space behind the drawers. “Pull the top left drawer out, would you?”
She pulled the drawer out, and Virgil asked, “Anything interesting?”
“Not that we haven’t looked at...”
“Can you pull the drawer all the way out? So it comes loose?” Virgil asked.
She tried. “No. It’s not made to come out. I can feel it hit some stops.”
Virgil said, “Hmm.” And, “Get anything good at the library?”
“Everybody agrees it’s a pubic hair. Actually, three pubic hairs; you missed some. I was at the autopsy and I can tell you they’re not Quill’s. He was a real blond.”
“Three pubic hairs... Unless the owner was shedding, they might have used it more than once.”
Virgil crawled out of the kneehole and stood up.
“What are you looking for?” Trane asked.
“The case housing the drawer is about eight or ten inches deeper than the drawer itself. No good reason for it, but it’s entirely enclosed,” he said.
“Maybe if we pushed the desk away from the wall, we could look in from the back?”
“No. If there’s a space there, you’d want to be able to access it without taking the room apart. My grandpa’s...”
Virgil pushed down on the left edge of the top: nothing.
He pulled up: nothing. Looked under the edge, couldn’t see anything except a scratch.
“There’s a scratch...” he said, going down to his knees.
“So what?”
“Well, it’d be a hard place to scratch,” Virgil said. “There’s, ah, a hole here... by the scratch... That’ll be it.”
“For a secret door? You gotta be joking,” Trane said.
