“I doubt that, but she could have told somebody about hooking up with Quill at midnight in the library,” Virgil said. “I wastold Nancy Quill could get fifteen million from the estate. Even if they peeled off only two or three, it’d certainly be worth doing.”
“No kidding... Oh, God, I got no time. I gotta be in court. I gotta call off this negotiation and send Cohen back to jail. I gotta make sure we hold her for the full forty-eight before the bond hearing. I gotta lot of shit to do.”
“You do that. And I’ll go talk to McDonald’s wife about the lawsuit.”
“Stay in touch, Virgil. We’re moving.”
—
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office was located in another fundamentally unimaginative, dirt-colored, ugly building in downtown Minneapolis, which didn’t bother Virgil because he didn’t have to look at it very often. He’d spoken to an assistant medical examiner on the ten-mile trip to Minneapolis from St. Paul, and the AME had promised to have the residue of the suicide ready to view.
The AME’s name was Julia Parker, and she met him in her modest cubicle, dumped an evidence box on the desk. The evidence included an amber pill bottle that had once contained thirty oxycodones; the bottle’s white plastic cap, which was well chewed; photos of the deathbed and the deceased in it; and autopsy photos. Parker hadn’t done the autopsy itself, which had been done by another AME who was now on a fishing trip in the Boundary Waters. “He told us if we had to reach him, we couldn’t.”
“How dead was he?” Virgil asked. “McDonald.”
“Completely,” Parker said with a hint of a smile. “The prescription had just been refilled, and they still had a few pills fromthe previous one. Mrs. McDonald said she’d consolidated them in the single bottle. As a matter of neatness, I guess.”
“And he was full of this stuff?”
“Yup. At least twenty-eight or twenty-nine, maybe as many as thirty to thirty-two. That’ll do it. Eighty milligrams can kill you, and he probably swallowed more than three hundred.”
“Fingerprints on the pill bottle?”
“Only Mr. McDonald’s. Frankly, if I was facing what he was facing, the inability to move anything but his head and with partial use of one arm, I’d do the same thing,” Parker said. “I’ve got nothing but sympathy for the poor man.”
Virgil picked up the autopsy photos. One of them showed McDonald’s mouth stretched open, with a couple of tiny flecks of white plastic between his teeth.
“So he chewed through the bottle.”
“Right. Mrs. McDonald had left it on a tray attached to the bed. She had no idea he could move his arm enough to reach the pills. But he did. We think he managed to bump the tray with his shoulder hard enough that the bottle fell over. Then he bumped the tray until the bottle fell off the tray and onto his arm. He grabbed it with the fingers of the other hand and pinned it to his chest, where he could reach it with his mouth. He still had good motion in his upper neck and head—he could turn it—and we think he managed to get the bottle in his mouth. He then chewed the cap until it came off, and, holding the bottle in his teeth, tipped his head back far enough to get the pills to fall into his mouth. Then he swallowed them. We also found fragments of the plastic cap in his gut.”
Virgil had a lot of sympathy for McDonald, too, but the police world didn’t run on sympathy, it ran on checks. He left theMedical Examiner’s Office and drove to a Walgreens drugstore, where he showed his ID to a pharmacist and was given four empty amber pill bottles with white plastic caps identical to the ones in the evidence box.
Then he sat in his truck and chewed one of them. And called Trane, who’d not yet gotten on the witness stand. “Complete clusterfuck in there,” she said. “What happened with you?”
Virgil told her about his visit to the medical examiner and about the bits of white plastic in McDonald’s mouth and stomach. “I went over to a Walgreens—that’s where his prescription had been filled—and got some of those pill bottles and tried to chew one of them open. I stopped because I was afraid I’d break my teeth. I did get the cap ragged enough that I cut my lip twice, and probably jabbed it three or four more times, but I had a hell of a time chewing that cap without dropping it, which I did. I kept having to pick it up and put it back in my mouth, and McDonald couldn’t do that.”
“And...”
“As far as I could tell from the photos, McDonald hadn’t done any damage at all to his lip. Pieces of plastic in his mouth, but no physical damage, and I don’t see how that would be avoidable. Also, the bottle had only his fingerprints on it. It should have had a lot of Mrs. McDonald’s prints because she was supposedly dispensing his medicine. It’s almost like somebody wiped the bottle clean of hers and then printed it with his.”
“Picture me weeping,” Trane said. “Are you telling me that McDonald was murdered?”
“I think assisted suicide is a possibility.”
“Connecting the dots, then, McDonald was either murdered by his wife or helped along to kill himself, and she then hired theHardy firm to represent her in a lawsuit, where they learn about Quill’s financial status and realize that if he were killed and were then unable to defend himself—”
“They could make a lot of money,” Virgil said. “A tub of money.”
“To get him in a private place where they could do the deed, they got Hardy’s other client, Cohen, to set him up. I talked to Cohen long enough to know that this was her third trip to the library. If she was familiar with the routine, she could probably have done something to the door to keep it open after Quill used his key.”
“We should at least keep all that in mind,” Virgil said.
“At least,” Trane said. “What’s your next step?”
“I’ll talk to Mrs. McDonald. See if she’s strong enough to lift a laptop over her head. If she killed once—”
“You, of course, see the fly in that particular ointment.”
