Virgil asked about drugs. “I’m not going to hassle you about it, but I need to know. Do you use coke?”
“I’ve tried it,” she admitted. “The guy buys it and wants to party, you know? I don’t buy it myself. It’s nice, but it’s expensive.”
“Did you ever give any to Quill?”
“Oh, no. He never mentioned drugs to me. You know, he was intense about the sex. He even got me off once, which never happens, but he did it because he was so into it. But as far as I know, he wasn’t into dope.”
They went over the story twice more, but nothing changed.Cohen had never been to Quill’s house, didn’t know he was a doctor. “I thought he was probably a finance guy. He acted like a finance guy. Except he didn’t fuck like a finance guy. He knew how to get it on. If you know what I mean.”
In the end, Trane said she’d go with Hardy to walk Cohen through the release procedures, which Watts had already approved. Virgil told Trane about talking to Foster and Foster’s suggestion that there must be something important on the missing laptop.
“Foster’s a smart guy, and he thinks the computer is the key, which would fit with this Boyd Nash character. When you think about it, if Nash is an industrial spy, it’d fit with the CD recording, too—an attempt at blackmail. Maybe he found out about the laptop but didn’t know Quill was... comforting... Miz Cohen.”
“‘Comforting,’” Trane repeated. “Nice.”
“You want to take Nash or should I?” Virgil asked.
“You found him, you take him. I’ll take a look at Hardy’s partner, this Jones guy. I’m interested in that whole sequence of events. Remember, Quill might not have practiced medicine, but hewasan M.D. If he spotted that whole pill bottle problem—the one you spotted—and started mooting around the idea that Frank McDonald was murdered...”
Virgil concurred, and asked, “You want to look at my cut lip?”
“No, I believe you. But...”
“What?”
“Until you showed up, I was running a nice logical investigation. Somehow, Flowers, you got me up to my hips in weird shit. How’d you do that?”
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Virgil started his run at Boyd Nash by going back to Trane’s desk at Minneapolis Homicide. He got Nash’s records from the DMV. Both his past and current driver’s licenses showed the same address. Virgil checked the address with the street view on Google Earth and found himself looking at a rambling ranch-style house, of white stone and natural wood, in the city of Edina, south of Minneapolis. A quick trip out to Zillow suggested the house would be worth something like a million and a half dollars.
If Nash was a thief, he was a good one.
Next he called up the files Trane had pulled from the National Crime Information Center. Boyd had been arrested twice for assault. First for going after a security guard at a Medtronic office in Fridley, a suburb of Minneapolis. That was a mistake: the security guard moonlighted as a bouncer at a biker bar and kicked Boyd’s ass before he called the cops.
The charges had been dismissed.
Then he was charged with domestic assault by a woman named Jon-Ellen Nord.
Again, the charges were dismissed.
Fridley was in Anoka County and he couldn’t raise anyone at the county attorney’s office, but the second arrest was in Hennepin County—in the city of Bloomington—and he did get an assistant county attorney in Hennepin and she was willing to give a little after-hours help.
She walked away from the phone for a few minutes, came back, and said that the woman who was attacked had dropped the charges. When the county attorney had resisted that decision, Nord had said that she’d overstated the seriousness of the attack.
Virgil: “What do you think?”
“There’s a totally improper note in the file,” the assistant county attorney said. “It says ‘The bitch was paid off.’ Remember that because I’m now removing it.”
“What do you think about that? The note?”
“I think the bitch was paid off,” she said.
“You got an address for her?”
—
