Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(17)

The two campus cops followed them to Quill’s carrel. Virgil unlocked the door, and said, “The pencil point is an inch away from it.”

“What is it?” the shorter of the two cops asked.

Trane didn’t answer. She got down on her knees, pushed her glasses back on her nose, looked, and said, “Okay.”

She stood up, and said, “Lock the door.”

Virgil did, and said, “We’ve got to go somewhere and talk about it.”

“There are a couple of study rooms here . . .”



* * *



—

The campus cops would have been happy to hear their conversation, but Virgil waved them off with a cheerful “See you later, guys” as he followed Trane to an empty room.

“Crime Scene ought to be here pretty quick, given what I told them and how their asses are now up around their ears,” Trane said. “If Quill was screwing somebody in there, it’d have to be after hours. And we know he was there after hours.”

“You had no hint that he was dating anybody?”

“Haven’t been able to find anyone,” she said. “There’ve been two weeks of publicity, and nobody’s come forward. Why would he be nailing somebody in the library? His house is a five-minute drive from here.”



* * *



—

“There’s something else,” Virgil said, and Trane’s eyebrows went up.

He told her about the campus cops investigating the maps theft and that a woman who worked in the library, apparently on the next floor up, had been questioned.

“A janitor, who may have been stoned at the time, thought he saw the woman over there late at night. In the map collection,” Virgil said. “She used to work there and might have had keys for both buildings. Suppose he spooked her and she wanted to get out of sight, so she came over here . . .”

“. . . and ran into Quill. But would she kill him? If she’s a librarian, wouldn’t she make an excuse and then ask him what the heck he was doing there?”

“That sounds reasonable, depending on how spooked she was. Whoever took the maps took at least thousands of dollars’ worth. From what those cops told me, they could be missing even more.”

“We need to dig into this,” Trane said.

“I’ll tell you what, Margaret, I think you need to dig into it. I’ve talked to two campus cops and a librarian here, and a secretary over at the Humphrey Center, and there have been all kinds of people walking around here since I reopened the carrel—so word could get out that some new guy is investigating. It’d be better for all of us if you were running this part of it.”

“You’re right,” Trane said, looking around. A student seemed to be watching them through the study room window. “I’ll take it. Thank you. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to give you the name of the woman the cops talked to . . .”

“I’ll check her hair color, too . . .” Trane said.

Virgil: “Yeah, do that, although—”

“I know. Would Quill be screwing a map thief? And why? That doesn’t sound right. But if that’s a pubic hair, it didn’t drift down from heaven.”

“We don’t know how long it’s been there,” Virgil said. “He might have been having an affair, bringing someone here, before he and his last wife broke up.”

“I don’t think so.” Trane shook her head. “He was an aristocratic kind of guy. If he was sleeping with someone, an equal, it would have been in a hotel. Someplace with a handy bathroom. It wouldn’t have been like this . . . in a library . . . on a yoga mat . . . after hours.”

“Margaret, there’s a pubic hair on the yoga mat and it ain’t his. There’s a bathroom fifty feet from here.”

“I’ll figure it out,” she said. She chewed on her lower lip, then said, “What if it was somebody young who he wouldn’t want to be seen in public with? A student?”

“Could be. But if he was the aristocratic sort, he might not care as long as she wasn’t thirteen or something.”

“Yeah . . . Okay . . . Now, what are you going to do?”

“I was going to meet you over at his house. That was next. Give me the key, come over when you’re done here. I’ll be a while.”

She nodded. “Be aware that his house has been lived in by several different women—his mother, for one, at least for a while before she died, plus three wives, and probably a couple of girlfriends. It’s full of about eighty years’ worth of family junk, including a stuffed pelican and several stuffed fish. We went through it all. Maybe you’ll find something. But I won’t be holding my breath.”





CHAPTER





FIVE



One of the things that Virgil liked best about the farm was the way it smelled. They had no animals, other than the dog and a chicken that had apparently escaped from a neighboring henhouse, so they didn’t have a barnyard stench. They did have fresh-cut hay, one of the best odors in the world, and hot summer flowers, which smelled as good as the hay. In Virgil’s opinion, August and September on the rural back roads of Minnesota made one of the prettiest landscapes imaginable, the roadside weeds and grasses and flowers going gold with the approaching autumn . . .