He didn’t have a suspect, but he did have a thought.
“It was a big deal when Quill got killed, even around Cultural Science,” May said. “We wondered if the cops would come after us. A couple days later, Sergeant Trane showed up. After she talked to me, I got to thinking. Why did Quill have a carrel at the Wilson Library, on the west bank, and why did he keep a huge, heavy computer there?”
“I’m listening,” Virgil said. “Why did he?”
May said, “I don’t know, but it might help if you figured it out. Listen, he’s a medical guy. We have a medical library here on the east bank. As far as I know, there are no medical books in the Wilson Library. He supposedly did some engineering work, too, in robotics, and the engineering library is over here. The university hospitals are here on the east bank, and he probably had an office there. I’m sure he had a private office at his lab—all those guys do. I understand his house is on the east bank. He has all kinds of private places and study possibilities over here, why did he go over there? You ever walk across the Mississippi footbridge in the winter? You can freeze your nuts off. Why did he have a little tiny carrel?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll think about it.”
“Here’s what I’m thinking. He went there because it was quiet and he was away from everybody else. Like, you know, where you want to think. This little Zen space is not your house. It’s not your lab, you don’t need to talk to anybody, you’ve got no TV tointerrupt you. You want a clear, calm mind to digest it all. Then somebody... I’m thinking Russians or Chinese... Could be a big American corporation...”
Virgil: “Russians? Or Chinese?”
“Sure. You must have read about it. They’ve got all these guys out there stealing American technology, and what’s more high-tech than medicine? Especially the kind that Quill was doing? Quill’s over there generating ideas, and tech, and somebody finds out about it, Russians or Chinese, computer experts. They start going over there to monitor that computer—maybe they have the computer secretly spooling up all of Quill’s input. Now he finds out that somebody is messing with his computer and knows they do it late at night because they need to do it when nobody’s there. He thinks it’s somebody from his lab, or a student, and he goes over to surprise the guy. And he gets the surprise instead.”
“That does sort of hold together,” Virgil admitted.
“Yeah, it does,” May said. “It has the massive disadvantage of being too complicated. It fucks over Occam and his razor. It’s possible that Quill was doing something online that he didn’t want to risk any chance of being traced to him. You know, watching porn and yanking the crank. Maybe buying dope on the dark net. Here’s a big question: was the guy who killed him in on whatever he was doing?”
They spent a couple of minutes speculating, came up with nothing solid. Virgil thanked him, gave him a card, walked back to his car, and then called Trane to tell her about May’s thought—not about the Russians and Chinese, or Quill yanking his crank, but the question of why he’d even have an office at the Wilson Library.
“A good question,” she conceded. “I wondered about that, too,but he was such a hotshot that I figured he could get an office anywhere he wanted one. So he got one there, maybe on a whim. Maybe his work took him across the river sometimes and he wanted a private place to rest his feet. I dunno.”
—
Virgil rang off and went to find Terry Foster, the military veteran. Foster lived across the city line in St. Paul.
As he drove, he thought about what both May and Trane had said and decided that Trane’s assumption was weak. If it was simply the casual exercise of academic power by Quill to get an extra office, what about the fact he probably had a library key? That would have taken more than clout: he’d have to have an illegal source for it. He’d probably have to evade janitors and other night workers if he didn’t want to be seen. There was more to the carrel than met the eye...
But Russians and Chinese? Unlikely.
—
Terry Foster lived in a tiny, stuccoed rental house in the area of St. Paul called Frogtown. A couple of aging birch trees shaded the neatly kept front yard, where a sidewalk of cracked concrete blocks led to an enclosed front porch. Virgil parked, knocked on the front door. There was no reaction from inside, but, as he was standing there, a man came out on the porch of the house next door, and said, “There’s nobody home.”
“Do you know when Mr. Foster will be back?”
The man said, “No. He’s in the hospital.”
Virgil walked over—a matter of twenty feet—identified himself, and asked, “He’s sick?”
“He got mugged, right in our own alley,” the man said. “Somebody beat the sweet livin’ bejesus out of him the night before last.”
According to the neighbor, Foster’s house had a single-car garage in the back, which wasn’t part of his rental deal. He had, instead, a parking space in the yard next to the garage. “When he got out of his car, some guy was waiting for him. Jumped out from behind the garage and beat him up. Terry was yelling for help, and the neighbor in back, Joe Lee, heard him and ran out and started yelling at the guy, who run off. Joe run out there and found Terry and called the cops. I didn’t hear him yelling, but I heard the ambulance, and I run out there and saw them put him in the ambulance. And he was a mess. He looked like he’d been blown up.”
“How do you know that part about the guy jumping out from behind the garage?”
“It was in thePioneer Press. I guess they got it from the cops,” the man said.
Foster had been taken to Regions Hospital, the neighbor said. When Virgil asked, he said that Foster lived alone, as far as he knew. “He did drink a little. There’s a street guy who goes around and takes aluminum cans out of the garbage and he told me once that Terry’s was good for thirty or forty cans. I guess he was drinking a six-pack a day.”
When the neighbor ran out of information, Virgil walked around behind the house to look at the garage. The thing had probably been designed and built before World War II and would be a tight fit for any modern car. There was an overhead door facing the alley and a door on the end closest to the house for access, with a graveled parking spot to one side. Two tall, aging arborvitae stood on either side of the access door, a good spot tohide if you were planning to ambush whoever parked on the graveled spot.
But no self-respecting mugger would have done that. If you got behind or between the arborvitae, you wouldn’t be seen from anywhere but the back window of the house. But if anyone saw you sneak in there, there’d be no excuse, either. And if they called the cops, you’d never see them coming.
As Virgil was walking around the garage, a man came out on the back porch of the house across the alley, and called, “Who are you?”
Virgil called back, “State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Are you Joe Lee?”
