“Only Dr. Quill. I don’t recognize the others,” she said.
“That’s Quill? Which one exactly?”
“The one that was pushing for the op. Man, that freaks me out. If they went ahead and did it, that’d be worth killing to cover up. I don’t care who they were, how big a shots. If they did it and that recording gets played, their careers are over.”
“If it doesn’t get out?”
“Well, then, nothing happened... And Dr. Quill is dead,” she said. “Has anybody else heard it?”
“Actually, we think it must be a rerecording. This could be a third- or fourth-generation recording.”
“Blackmail,” she said. “You know what? That could be years old. There’s no way to know what they’re talking about”—she looked over her shoulder as if she were frightened—“but if that recording gets out and it’s about something recent, the university will go through this lab with a flamethrower. There won’t be anybody left. I gotta get out of here. Before it’s too late.”
“Really?”
“Really. That’s some bad juju, fuckin’ Flowers. That’s a fuckin’ A-bomb.”
—
Virgil left the lab, walked down the hall to the elevators, took one down to the street, went outside, called Trane again. When she answered her phone, he said, “We got a problem.”
“Uh-oh. Did you screw something up?”
“Not exactly. I talked to one of the women in the lab about therecording. It scared her. She said that the bad guy was definitely Quill, which is too bad because I was beginning to like him. She seemed sure of it, but Nancy Quill said it wasn’t him.”
“Goddamnit. They’ve been rehearsing me all afternoon, treating me like a moron, and I was so frustrated and pissed that I was going to go home and eat an entire pie, but now I have to meet up with you and push Nancy Quill up against a wall.”
“You wanna be the bad cop?”
“If she lied to me, I’ll be the bad cop whether I want to be or not because I’ll be mondo pisso,” Trane said. “I’ll meet you there. Like, right now.”
—
Virgil found his way back to Nancy Quill’s condo, spotted Trane parked on the street in a no-parking zone. Virgil rolled up behind her, put his BCA sign in the window, and got out.
“One good thing about this: if she lied, we might be onto something,” Virgil said, as Trane got out of her car.
“I realized that on the way over,” Trane said. “It eased the pain. But I’m still going to eat that pie.”
“What kind?”
“Apple. I’ll warm it up.”
“Vanilla ice cream?”
“It ain’t warm apple pie if there’s no vanilla ice cream.”
—
Quill buzzed them through the entry door. They took the elevator up and found Quill waiting in the hall outside her condo.
“What’s going on?” Quill asked. “Did you get him?”
“No,” Trane said. “Let’s sit down.”
“What?” Quill asked, as she backed into her front room. Virgil pulled the door closed, and they sat in separate easy chairs facing one another.
Trane said, “Agent Flowers believes there’s a problem with the statement you gave to me about the recording I played for you.”
