Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(108)

“I’ll still be there, in the library. And Virgil? Thank you.”

“For what?”

“I think you know for what.”



* * *



—

Virgil encountered Harry, the beer drinker, when he stayed over Saturday night. Virgil walked into the bar, and Harry asked, “You get him?”

“Yup.”

“Hey, congratulations.” He flagged down Alice, said, “Give him another bottle of cow piss. He got the killer.” To Virgil: “He was a kid, right? I want to hear the whole story.”

“No, he was a grown adult,” Virgil said.

“The way you said that makes me suspicious,” Harry said. “How old was he in years?”

“Not certain yet.”

“Was he going to high school or college?”

“Maybe,” Virgil said.

“Ha! He’s a kid,” Harry said to Alice. “I was right. Had you met him before?”

“Only briefly,” Virgil said. “Not really long enough to make much of an impression.”

“Ha! You did meet him. He was part of the cast, like I said,” Harry crowed. “With that kind of insight, I should have been a cop. Or a psychiatrist. Anything but a McDonald’s owner.”

“Maybe a bartender,” Virgil said. “You want another one? To celebrate your insight?”

“Sure.”

“That’d be five,” Alice said. “I dunno.”

Harry shook a finger at her. “‘There are strange things done in the midnight sun / By the men who moil for gold.’”

“Oh, no,” she said.

Virgil: “Go for it, man.”



* * *



—

The governor called Virgil early on Sunday morning. “I just heard from Bunny Quill, and she told me you got the killer. I wanted to thank you personally. I would even suggest you might apply for a spot on my personal protection detail.”

“Ah, thank you, but no, I have a farm to tend, Governor, and I . . .” He was tap-dancing at a ferocious rate and managed to stave the man off.

Dipshit.

When he got off the phone with the governor, he called Davenport, who was still in bed, and asked him to tip off his media connections about the chase and the arrest. “Emphasize that Margaret Trane shot Krause when he got out of the car with a knife and was about to attack her. Get some cameras over to her house.”

“I can do that.”

Trane called two hours later. “Did you have anything to do with the crowd of TV assholes that turned up on my lawn an hour ago?”

“Mmm, maybe.”

“We had a nice talk,” she said. “Virgil, thank you. I’d like to find a more substantial way to thank you.”

“I’m open to that as long as it doesn’t involve sex,” Virgil said. “I’m already committed.”

“You know, you’re not always as funny as you think you are,” Trane said.

Virgil said, “Okay. When I get my ass in trouble down south, I may give you a ring. Get some cow manure on your Louboutins.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” she said.



* * *



—

Krause would get a public defender, who eventually suggested, after several long interviews, that his client would plead guilty to a second degree murder charge in the death of Quill. He said that Krause denied killing Brett Renborne and had an excellent alibi: he’d been in Faribault without a car.

Krause, he said, had been misunderstood by Megan Quill: he’d never told her that he’d killed Renborne, she had imagined it in her fear. The kidnapping, he said, had essentially been a domestic fight between friends.

None of it would wash, Trane told Virgil in a phone call, but he might evade doing a full thirty years in prison, without parole, the minimum sentence for a first degree murder charge in Minnesota. “If the state takes the second degree plea and kidnapping, served concurrently, he could get thirty years, but without doing the mandatory full term of a first degree conviction. He could be out in twenty or so.”

“What’s the county attorney thinking?”

“I think they’re thinking they’ll drag along for a while. After the press gets back to worrying about movie stars and their love lives, they’ll try to sneak through the deal. His public defender is a good one: he knows every rope there is.”

“Well, at least the asshole got shot and stabbed in the eye,” Virgil said.

“There you are, brother.”



* * *



—

Katherine Green called, and asked Virgil if he thought Trane might participate in a longitudinal study of policewomen who have shot criminal suspects. Virgil said he had no idea. “Give her a call. Who knows? Could be interesting.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Green said. “Interesting.”



* * *



—

Virgil made it out of Minneapolis late Sunday night, arriving at the farm at eleven o’clock. Sam got out of bed to meet him, and Virgil and Sam and Frankie had warm rhubarb pie and vanilla ice cream in the kitchen.

When Sam was back in bed, and Virgil’s clothes were in the wash, he and Frankie went up to the bedroom. They lay awake in the dark for a while, talking about the case, and then Frankie said, “So, I needed to get a yellow highlighter pen. I couldn’t find one downstairs, but you’ve always got a bunch of them. I stuck my nose in your desk—honest, I was looking for a highlighter—and I found the novel.”