“Maybe not.”
“The man who attacked your Mr. Foster: Foster says it definitely was a man, and a fairly large one. Not tall, but heavy.”
“We’ll call it a mugging,” Virgil said.
“That’s not what you were calling it before,” Trane said.
“That’s when I thought I had a lead,” Virgil said. “Now things have gotten funkier. I will call you as soon as I know something.”
“Wish I was there.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Trane had spoken to Brennan, the university’s lawyer, about the lawsuit, but had never talked to McDonald. Virgil found McDonald’s first name—Ruth—in the lawsuit, ran her full name through the DMV, found three Ruth McDonalds in Minneapolis and St. Paul, cross-referenced it with Frank McDonald, found three Franks, but only one common address among the six.
Virgil needed to get a sandwich before he went hunting for McDonald. He thought for a moment, then called BCA headquarters and asked for Jenkins or Shrake, the BCA’s resident thugs. Shrake was there, picked up a phone, and asked, “What do you want? Wait. I know. You want me to drive to some godforsaken shithole on the edge of SoDak where somebody will shoot me in the eye with a BB gun—”
Virgil interrupted. “St. Louis Park.”
“St. Louis Park?” He sounded nonplussed. St. Louis Park was an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis. “What do I have to do?”
“Scare the shit out of a middle-class woman,” Virgil said.
“Huh. Sounds like fun. What else do I get out of it?”
“I’m driving over to the Red Cow Uptown before I go find her,” Virgil said. “I’ll buy.”
“See you there in twenty,” Shrake said.
“Sounds unlikely, but I’ll wait.”
—
Virgil was sitting on the street down from the Red Cow Uptown, chatting with Frankie on his cell phone, when Shrake pulled up beside him, held up a wrist with a Rolex on it, tapped the watch face twice, and went up the street and around a corner. He was walking back a minute later, debonair in a summer-weight gray wool suit, white shirt, and shiny blue silk tie. Virgil caught him at the door of the Red Cow.
“I didn’t understand the watch signal,” Virgil said.
“Twenty minutes on the dot,” Shrake explained. “I had to do a little shake ’n’ bake on 94. There might be an eighteen-wheeler up in the weeds.”
Shrake was a large man with a complicated nose set over too-white implanted teeth—replacements for teeth he’d broken or had knocked out over the years. The last time he’d worked a major case with Virgil, he’d been grazed with a broadhead arrow. The arrow left a foot-long scar between his shoulder blades that Shrake claimed had tightened up his golf swing and cut three strokes off his handicap.
“I made the mistake of saying that out loud,” Shrake said, as they took a table. “If I’d kept my mouth shut, and my old handicap, I’d have made a thousand bucks by now.”
“I feel sorry for you not being able to cheat,” Virgil said. He handed Shrake a menu. “Get what you want, I’m going with the Double Barrel.”
—
Virgil told him all about the Quill case—everything he had. Shrake had been following the story in the papers but hadn’t heard anything else, other than that Margaret Trane was working the case. “Trane and I had a thing once, back when we were young.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear this,” Virgil said.
“I’m not going to tell you anything else... other than the fact that when you got out of Maggie Trane’s bed, you definitely knew you’d been in bed with Maggie Trane. I lost about five pounds that first night.”
“She’s married now,” Virgil said. “A doctor.”
“I know. He’s a fourteen handicap out at Edina.”
